Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg Subpoenaed By Investigators In Michael Cohen Case

Federal investigators are getting closer to the heart of the Trump Organization. The chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg has been subpoenaed to testify, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Weisselberg’s name came up on the secretly recorded tape in which Donald Trump‘s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, discusses a payoff to former Playboy model Stormy Daniels. Cohen can be heard telling Trump that he’s “spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with…”

Last year, according the Wall Street Journal, Weisselberg arranged for the Trump Organization to pay Cohen a monthly retainer of $35,000 after Cohen had paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair with Trump.

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The Washington Post called the subpoena possibly the “biggest shoe to drop” from the Cohen tape. He’s worked for the Trump Organization for decades, and before joining the company, he worked for Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. When Trump became president, he handed over the day-to-day control of the business to his two elder sons and Weisselberg.

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CNN’s Jake Tapper sited an unnamed source from inside the Trump Organization who called Weisselberg’s subpoena the “ultimate nightmare scenario” for Trump because Weisselberg “knows anything and everything.”

“He plays an integral part in the Trump Organization’s growth and continued financial success,” Ivanka Trump said in an email to the Wall Street Journal in 2016 while the newspaper was preparing a profile of Weisselberg. “He is deeply passionate, fiercely loyal and has stood alongside my father and our family for over [three] decades.”

Timothy O’Brien, who wrote the Trump biography Trump Nation and interviewed Weisselberg, called Cohen a “small fish” in “Trumplandia,” while Weisselberg is a major player. Weisselberg knows “more about the Trump Organization’s history and finances than nearly anyone,” O’Brien wrote in an opinion piece for Bloomberg. His emergence on the Cohen tape “should worry the president,” O’Brien added.

Article by Steven Abendroth