In the hush money trial against former President Donald Trump, prosecutors walked the jury through the financial intricacies of the case. The prosecution’s key witness, Jeffrey McConney, a former chief of accounting at the Trump Organization, testified about a payment of $420,000 to Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, a transaction structure he described as unfamiliar to him.
McConney recounted being instructed to pay Cohen by Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former Chief Financial Officer, who is currently in jail for perjury related to another Trump case. The instruction came in January 2017, the month of Trump’s inauguration, during a meeting where Weisselberg showed him a bank statement with handwritten notes and dollar amounts.
The bank statement revealed a $130,000 payment to a lawyer representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors allege that this payment was for a shell company set up by Cohen to pay off Daniels’ lawyer in exchange for her silence. Weisselberg’s notes suggested a total of $420,000 to be paid to Cohen in monthly installments of $35,000, starting in February 2018.
McConney spent hours on the stand, examining invoices, emails, company ledger entries, and government filings. Prosecutors claim that these payments weren’t for legal work, as suggested by the retainer agreement between Trump and Cohen, but were reimbursements disguised as taxable income. This scheme was designed to reimburse Cohen for the hush money payment to Daniels, with the extra money intended to cover Cohen’s tax liabilities.
Weisselberg’s notes indicated a doubling of the expense reimbursement to $360,000 to cover taxes, plus a $60,000 bonus. When asked by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo if he’d ever heard of expense reimbursements being doubled to cover taxes, McConney responded with a simple “No.”
McConney testified that Weisselberg asked him to keep Cohen’s bank statement, which he tucked into a payroll ledger kept in a locked cabinet in his office at Trump Tower. Despite the instructions, McConney stated that Weisselberg never explained what the payments were for, other than what was shown in the bank statement.
