In an effort to get Donald Trump out from under a 34-felony count indictment for paying off adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual tryst before the 2016 election, the former president's lawyers have been forced to concede that their client's business is poorly run and easily defrauded.
According to MSNBC analyst Ryan Teague Beckwith, a key part of Donald Trump's defense team's efforts to undermine the testimony of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was getting him to admit that he scammed the Trump Organization out of thousands of dollars without their knowledge.
As Beckwith wrote, that admission and the subsequent reaction from Trump Org executive Eric Trump revealed that the former president's company is "shoddily" run, which runs counter to Trump's longtime boasts about what an outstanding businessman he is.
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Trump attorney Todd Blanche, "asked if Cohen 'stole from the Trump Organization,' and Cohen admitted without hesitation that he had. Trump’s allies sought to portray this as a damaging moment for the prosecution, and it certainly wasn’t helpful for Cohen’s credibility as a witness. Trump’s son Eric gloated about the admission on social media, saying the trial 'just got interesting,'" the analyst wrote before pointing out, "But the younger Trump, an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, should be a little more interested in how Cohen got away with it."
Pointing out that during the case, "a court-appointed independent monitor also found that the company needed to change its procedures and update financial statements, noting that despite cooperating, the organization still regularly provided documents 'lacking in completeness and timeliness," Beckwith suggested, "Much of this can be chalked up to the Trump Organization being a privately held conglomerate. Because they aren’t listed on stock exchanges, privately held companies don’t have to meet the strict disclosure requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Still, few of the more than 25 million privately held companies in the U.S. are run in as slipshod a manner as these various stories have shown."
Noting that whether Donald Trump is convicted or walks away a free man, the analyst predicted the hush money trial will leave the myth of Trump the successful businessman damaged, with Beckwith writing, "Whatever else it accomplishes, the hush money trial has again pulled back the curtain to reveal the real boardroom, and it’s not a pretty sight."
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