BloombergTim O’Brien, one of the few journalists who saw former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, told Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC on Thursday night that he will sleep better now than Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance , finally has eight years of Trump financial documents, from 2011 to 2019. Trump “is very afraid of what is in those documents, I think,” because they put him at serious criminal risk, said O’Brien, but he is not the only involved.
O’Brien went on to explain why he thinks Trump’s chief accountant, Allen Weisselberg, is likely to deceive Trump. “What we really need to focus on here is that it’s not just the tax records that Cy Vance has now,” said O’Brien. “He probably has reams and reams of the accountant’s work product. This is a criminal case, they will need to prove criminal intent on the part of Trump, his three oldest children, Allen Weisselberg, and anyone else in the Trump Organization who fell under the parameters of this investigation. And if there is e-mail and notes and other communication records about what they intended to do when they increased the value of the buildings so that they could get loans against them, then they changed and emptied the value of the buildings so that they could pay lower taxes on them, and there is a communication about that prior to any of these tax entries, which is gold for a prosecutor. “
A few hours earlier, O’Brien told Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC that the specific eight years of documents that Vance’s team has “are important, because they predate Trump’s rise to the White House and I think it helps build the narrative around of the money trail and Trump’s motivations for his destructive and obscene dance with people like Vladimir Putin. It’s a pity that they couldn’t come back – I think this is one of the tragic flaws in Robert Mueller’s investigation, he could have come back more far, I think, from what Cy Vance is capable of in Trump’s finances. “
O’Brien also pointed out that the investigation involves at least Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump, and “also targets people within the Trump Organization who can report Trump if they are exposed to criminal liability”, but “the bronze ring in all of that is that if Trump has a criminal conviction, he will not be able to run for president again, and that is also hanging over all of that. “
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