Allen Weisselberg is going through some things
Allen Weisselberg has apparently hired attorneys who have a specialty in fighting the specific criminal charges he’s been hit with. Some observers are taking this as confirmation that he’ll never cut a plea deal. But this logic is easily refuted.
We all know that Weisselberg doesn’t currently intend to flip. So if he does end up flipping, that’ll require changing his mind, and thus changing his plans. If he does flip, he’ll still spend every minute between now and then trying to convince everyone involved (us, prosecutors, Donald Trump, even himself) that he’ll never flip. So you can’t logically say that “Because Weisselberg hired this lawyer or filed this paperwork, it means he’ll never flip.”
Let’s say you’re planning to go on a trip. You’re going to do everything that needs to be done in order to go on that trip, in the timeframe it needs to be done in, even if you think it might fall through. You’ll buy a ticket when you need to, you’ll pack a bag by the time you need to, and so on. If you fear you might have to ultimately change course, you might do these things with an eye toward being able to undo them later. But you’re still going to do them all, because failure to do them would mean closing the door to going on the trip, at a time when you still intend to go on it.
Similarly, of course Weisselberg has hired attorneys with a speciality of fighting these kinds of charges. If he failed to hire these kinds of attorneys, he’d be closing the door to fighting the charges. And for now he still wants to fight the charges. So it tells us nothing about whether he’ll flip later.
What are the odds Allen Weisselberg will end up flipping? We’re all just guessing. We don’t live in his head. But at this point there is nothing anyone can point to that proves he won’t flip. You can only point to things that prove he’s not going to flip today. Tomorrow, next week, next month, are a whole other story.
Weisselberg wouldn’t be the first defendant to hire aggressive lawyers with the intention of fighting the charges, then ultimately change his mind, dump his lawyers, and bring in new lawyers who have a specialty in negotiating the most lenient plea deal possible. In fact it’s pretty much how things work when it does happen. So we’ll see.
