On May 11, 2019, I wrote a blog post entitled, “Trump Won’t Like Notes at The Judgment.” It was about Congress questioning White House lawyer Don McGahn about the Mueller report. I explained therein, “President Trump had permitted Don McGahn to be interviewed by the Mueller team for about thirty hours, which is a lot. Mueller’s report further states that Trump once saw McGahn taking notes of their conversation. Trump then said to McGahn, ‘Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.’ McGahn answered by saying ‘a real lawyer’ takes notes to create a record. It seems McGahn then insinuated that he was a real lawyer whereas Trump’s past lawyers were not.”
I continued, “Some have compared this no notes style preferred by Trump to the Mafia. But Trump, like the rest of us, needs to get used to it. Notes usually tell what was truly said. In fact, everything we do and say is being recorded in heaven for an important purpose.”
Then I quoted various texts from the New Testament which inform that sometime in the future all people will stand before the Judgment of God and be held accountable for how they lived their lives. One such text, in the book of Revelation, informs (written in the past tense because the author was recording a vision he had seen), “and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead [who had been raised to life] were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. . . . and all were judged according to what they had done” (Revelation 20.12-13 NRSV).
Apparently, Donald Trump doesn’t like recording some of what he has done or said because he doesn’t want it to be evidence of any wrongdoing he has done that might be used against him in the future. This is interesting in light of what happened Thursday.
After nearly a three-year investigation of the Trump Organization and Donald Trump, the Office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., under the auspices of a grand jury, brought fifteen criminal charges in a Manhattan court against the Trump Organization and its Chief Financial Officer, Allen Weisselberg, that covered the past fifteen years. The court papers filed reveal that Mr. Weisselberg not only did the standard procedure of keeping a set of accounting books for the record, but he kept another set of the same books that were secret, thus “off the record,” in which he recorded different information showing he purposely evaded paying federal, state, and local income taxes for himself, the Trump Organization, and Donald Trump.
This information appears to render the Vance indictment an air-tight case, in which Mr. Weisselberg will face ten years or more imprisonment, if prosecutors can prove it in court. The next question will be if Mr. Trump will also be implicated in this fraudulent scheme. Keeping two sets of differing books like this could prove to be the ultimate kind of evidence that Donald Trump has tried to avoid in his life so as to not be charged with wrongdoing.
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