Consider Weisselberg’s situation from his perspective: he probably (?) doesn’t remember making a conscious choice to become complicit in Trump’s illegal schemes to defraud the government. Assume he started out as an accountant who landed a good job with a real estate company, and diligently tried for years to file Fred Trump’s taxes without doing anything too blatantly illegal, and then did things that were dicier and dicier, until he’d gone way over the line, but by that time, he probably thought, “We’ve been getting away with this sort of thing for a long time, and I’m making some pretty good money here” and for the last few decades he’s been neck-deep in the shit without ever reaching a moment where he thought “Should I do THIS? Or THAT, which is even more clearly illegal than THIS?”
Have you ever been asked to do something illegal by your boss, and recognized that moment as a crucial turning point in your life? I have. I remember clearly sitting on a hiring committee that was openly discussing an applicant’s race as a qualification for a job, and I told my boss, “Either you stop talking about this right now, or I’m resigning from the committee.” I was told it was only talk, and it was harmless, and who would ever know, and I responded with “If the person who doesn’t get the job ever finds out that he didn’t get it because of his race, and I’m called to testify under oath about this discussion, I will not perjure myself to keep your asses out of jail” (I don’t think I said “asses,” but the rest is pretty much verbatim.)
Do you think people tend not to recognize when they’re being asked to do illegal things at work, and find themselves caught up in it after they’ve colluded to commit a crime, or do you think they tell themselves, “Yeah, that’s some illegal shit, but I want to keep my job/ get promoted/probably can get away with it/etc.”?
You may want to read Michael Cohen’s book, Disloyal. I found it fascinating yet nauseating at the same time. He admits to all kinds of wrongdoing at the behest of Trump. What I got out of it is that Cohen developed a massive infatuation with Trump, practically amounting to worship. What Trump wanted was more important than his family. (His wife, and especially his daughter kept telling him he was in hot water and should cut ties with Trump, but he ignored them.)
I worked with a couple of people who ended up serving time for fraud (a few months in Federal prison). They did this at the behest bosses who made tens of millions from the fraud. They personally made at most a couple hundred thousand, or more accurately were PROMISED those amounts in bonuses, stock options and pay raises. The whole scheme collapsed.
They were totally aware that what they were doing was improper. Not least because I told them that and so did several others. We were fired for speaking up. Thanks to the higher level of secrecy around the accounts we couldn’t be sure that they ended up doing on their own what they originally asked us to do. But when the Feds moved in it all came out.
Dozens of other also participated in some way, but before Sarbanes Oxley it was not clear that they had criminal liability because they weren’t DIRECTLY involved in creating the fraudulent accounts. They knew perfectly well what they were doing was wrong. The rationale was something like “Here’s an email from the CEO with CFO and Controller on copy, who are we to argue?”
In another company at another time, a group of colleagues were forging contracts. They were literally typing up contracts with different pricing and terms than the company had approved and forging signatures of the authorized signers.
When this blew up, they testified in depositions that they had no idea all this was improper, never mind illegal. They were literally “taking care of the customer” as they were supposed to do according to the Values Statement. I’m pretty sure they weren’t really that stupid.
No, but thanks for the summary. I suspect I would learn specifics from reading it, but nothing surprising. I heard clips of him threatening people and understood that this was a completely amoral sleazebag.
I suspect it depends. What Weisselberg was indicted for directly benefited him and others, and I can imagine him thinking the government would never catch on that he wasn’t paying taxes on the benefits. The two sets of books they kept for mortgage applications benefited Trump, not him directly.
I had a friend who was a high state government official. His brother-in-law, also an official and a sleazebag, was involved in a financial scam. He offered my friend an in to it, and said he was an idiot for refusing. The sleazebag got caught. I suspect it takes more morals than a lot of people have to refuse something that could double your wealth.
Another book suggestion - Why They Do It. I picked it up out of mild curiosity because I was on the jury years ago for one of these cats, but I thought it was pretty interesting investigation of the motivations of these people. Short story - the answers are all over the map from out and out sociopaths, to the merely arrogantly overconfident, to the willfully deluded.
To be honest I can empathize in many cases. (Of course they need to be punished, and society in general must clamp down much more strongly on these behaviours, don’t get me wrong)
There’s a concept in psychology related to “unclean hands”. I can’t remember the correct term for it.
But basically, let’s say you have a person principled enough that they would refuse to do X. But you ask them first to break a fairly trivial rule Y first. Now they may be much more willing to do X because they already feel like someone who abandoned their principles. They are looking at themselves as “chaotic good” or whatever.
Yes. It would have been an easy thing for me to let my boss and the other senior people in the committee room discuss the race of job applicants as a (dis)qualification for the position–afterwards my girlfriend bawled me out for starting trouble by telling them that what they were doing was illegal and I wouldn’t be a party to it. I certainly wasn’t thought of as a “team player” for years afterwards. And they were right in a sense–it probably wouldn’t result in a lawsuit, and they probably would have gotten away with it if I had said nothing. Becoming complicit was the smarter move for me, personally.
I was on a town committee where the other members were proposing reserving subsidized housing for “long-time senior residents” of the town. Since the town was almost 100% white until about 20 years ago, the eligible population would be 100% white.
I pointed out that this would fail any discrimination test by the funding bodies (state and federal governments) and was probably illegal under the fair housing act. I was effectively told to shut up and sit down not just by the chairperson but also by the town lawyer! Of course this caused the whole plan to be rejected by the state and delayed the project by one year.
Apparently the whole point was to show the people of the town that the committee members in particular, and the town government in general, were fighting to “preserve the historical semi rural nature of town” which I now understand means keep the town white.
I resigned after my comments didn’t show up in the meeting minutes.
And in these environments there is a strong pressure put on people in different roles to go along, to, as mentioned, be the team player and NOT be the person pointing out “wrongs”, and most pointendly that if you want a long and succesful career headed for the top suite, bug bucks and fancy society events full of A-listers, your job is to make the boss look good while keeping him clean, and that nobody gets offered a million-dollar bonus and full partnership for saying “I quit my last job because of a moral disagreement”. Especially because once you start compromising, after a while “sunk cost” considerations kick in. "All this work… for nothing? I’m so close to where I wanted to be… Do I now get to start again w/o having a good reference? Will people challenge me on why it took me eight years to grow a conscience? Damn, it’s going to come out that I acquiesced to that, isn’t it, and I will be the scapegoat, won’t I…? Unless… unless I am of value in running the scam… "
And somewhat related is the whole “better to be inside the tent acting as a scold than to leave and let them all do even more horrible things.” I think that was the big rationale inside the Trump administration by those with a shred of a moral conscience–and it was 99% self-serving BS. Much better for them to have quit publicly, after threatening to go public if they didn’t stop all the illegal shit. No one, as far as I know, came even close to doing that.
I think some people honestly think everyone does this, all the time, that “everyone knows”. I read Enron was like that: kids coming in from college, being told “everyone does this” and believing it. Gaetz and his little sex trafficker friend seem cut from this mold: they seemed to sincerely believe constant corruption was an absolute entitlement. I think Trump thinks this way.