We seriously doubt that anyone will have any trouble believing this new report out Saturday. Prosecutors are telling the Washington Post that the Trump Organization essentially led the investigators down the proverbial “yellow-brick” road to their own indictment. How very Trumpian. No wonder he never wanted anyone to see his records or allow anyone to respond to a subpoena. It would just be too easy.

Now, this really is stupid, even a financial idiot writer would likely recognize this as a bad idea:

In documents filed in New York Supreme Court last week, prosecutors claimed that the company had spent 15 years paying its chief financial officer “off the books,” giving him cars, an apartment, tuition payments and cash that were hidden from income tax authorities.

But at the same time, according to allegations included in the indictment, the Trump Organization also was keeping internal spreadsheets that tallied the payments that were being hidden.

Typical Trump. They were going to save themselves some tax money by paying Weisselberg off the books with some “gifts,” but in order to ensure that they didn’t overpay Weisselberg, the Trump Organization kept books that set out the value in salary earned through the “alternative payments.” Nice work, dumbasses. So the document with the real salary was basically sitting right beside the “alternative” non-taxed salary.

Not only did the spreadsheets tell the prosecutors exactly how much the Trump organization avoided in taxes, but the document also operates as a confession. They knew the amount of taxes avoided, why they set the system up, and the amount they cheated out of the government. The documents are the paper equivalent of a contract to commit a crime.

Prosecutors treated the spreadsheets as the accounting equivalent of a confession. They said the ledgers themselves showed the size of the fraud, estimating that Weisselberg alone had avoided paying more than $900,000 in taxes. And that concealment, they said, showed that the Trump Organization knew it was wrong.

Now the question becomes whether the Manhattan D.A. can link the payments directly to Trump. It strains credibility to believe that significant money would be transferred around the company without Trump knowing. Still, the question is whether they can prove it:

Trump himself has not been charged in the case; in Thursday’s arraignment, Dunne said the company’s “former CEO” — possibly referring to Trump — had personally signed “many of the illegal compensation checks.” The charging documents said Weisselberg orchestrated the scheme with “others” from the company but did not say who.

As we’ve reported elsewhere, we believe (but cannot prove) that the Manhattan D.A. has held information back, knowing that Trump will shoot his mouth off about these particular charges – out in the open, and thus getting himself further in trouble with the stuff that remains held back. It is also hard to believe that a micromanager like Trump wouldn’t be involved in setting all this up.

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