Legal expert explains how criminal indictment would be “almost a death blow” to the Trump Organization

| 9:00 pm EDT June 26, 2021
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When the New York Times reported yesterday that New York’s first round of criminal indictments in the case against Donald Trump will include an indictment against the Trump Organization, it led to a lot of discussion about what this means. After all, indicting a company is very rare.

Palmer Report firmly expects that such an indictment will merely be a warm-up act for inevitable individual indictments against the Trump Organization’s principal officers, most of whom are named “Trump.” After all, you don’t indict a company just because the CFO was doing some corrupt things with the books. You indict a company because you believe you can prove that the principal officers were all in on a criminal conspiracy.

That said, it still raises questions about what an initial criminal indictment against the Trump Organization this week would actually do. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman says that such an indictment would actually be really serious. He cautions that he’s not necessarily taking the New York Times reporting at face value. But he also adds that an indictment would quickly isolate and bankrupt the Trump Organization:

We agree with Goldman on his premise that New York isn’t going to indict the Trump Organization just because Weisselberg did some things wrong. If the Trump Organization is indicted this week, it’ll mean that prosecutors have uncovered enough systemic criminal wrongdoing to take down everyone at the top of the company.