The lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert Muller's investigation offered an analysis on MSNBC after Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to fifteen charges on Thursday as part of a plea agreement that will result in a five-month sentence to Rikers Island Prison Complex.
MSNBC's Katy Tur interviewed NYU Law professor Andrew Weissmann, who served as chief of the fraud section at the Department of Justice prior to his appointment to Mueller's team. He had also previously served as general counsel for the FBI.
Weissmann noted Georgetown Law professor Paul Butler had listed the state and federal investigations Trump is known to be facing.
Weissmann said, "I think the sleeper case here is the Manhattan D.A.'s office. You know, I think that it isn't getting enough attention and there are a lot of telltale signs in that case that the Manhattan D.A.'s office is not done with Weisselberg or Donald Trump in the way that it's particularly crafted."
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Tur asked Weissmann to, "expand on why you think that this is so intriguing."
Weissmann noted that Weisselberg will have to testify at the Oct. 24th trial of the Trump Organization.
"It seems very, very hard to testify truthfully in that case and not implicate Donald Trump," the former prosecutor explained. "We're not talking about a huge company like Exxon or JPMorgan, we're talking about a small family-owned company and the scheme was so rampant with signatures by Donald Trump himself, I think that he has very reputable lawyers who are going to tell him if you want your five-month deal, you have to be truthful in front of the judge who is ultimately going to sentence you."
"So I think it would be very hard not to implicate Donald Trump," Weissmann continued. "But the second thing that I found really telling is there was no coverage provision here. And what I mean by that is a typical defendant asked the government I will plea to x, y and z but I need to know this is it, I'm not going to get charged again. So what you normally see is the defendant pleading but the government putting on the record that this covers a whole host of potential crimes. In this case what you would have expected to see is something that said that this covers any and all crimes that Allen Weisselberg may have committed as part of the Trump Organization. That was not in there."
"That is not something that — these are such good lawyers that he has, we're not dealing with sort of the run-of-the-mill people that you see in sort of Trump world, these are really first-rate lawyers — they clearly had to have asked for that," he continued. "To me, that is a tell that there is more that the Manhattan D.A.'s office has up their sleeve."
"Time will tell whether I'm right, but it is striking to me that there wasn't that coverage language," Weissmann concluded.
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