Trump Organization to be sentenced for tax fraud – live

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Trump Organization fined $1.6m in tax fraud case

A judge in New York has ordered Donald Trump’s business to pay $1.6m after it was found guilty of tax charges:

As we wait for the sentencing of the Trump Organization, CNN reports that special counsel Jack Smith’s office wants to interview two people hired by the former president’s legal team to search his properties for classified documents.

The justice department has for months been trying to get to the bottom of Donald Trump’s possession of classified material, which sparked the August search of his Mar-a-Lago resort. Since then, Trump’s attorneys have been combing other properties for any government secrets that may be stored there. CNN reports that Smith, who attorney general Merrick Garland appointed in November to handle the inquiry into the Mar-a-Lago secrets and Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, is demanding the unnamed people hired to carry out the search be interviewed.

Here’s more from CNN’s report:

Prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and Trump’s defense lawyers have gone back and forth several times in the past two months over whether Trump has fully complied with a subpoena issued last May for classified documents from his time in the White House.

That has prompted Trump’s lawyer Timothy Parlatore to twice certify in writing that Trump’s team searched his homes and offices for more records. The new rounds of certifications haven’t been reported previously.

Some of Trump’s properties, such as at his golf course in Scotland and his Las Vegas hotel, weren’t searched, yet Trump’s team believed they did a thorough job, looking everywhere they believed presidential records might have been, sources say.

In a statement, Parlatore told CNN that the Justice Department has “rejected offers of cooperation in favor of heavy-handed tactics to create a false impression of noncompliance in the absence of evidence.”

Parlatore added: “President Trump did nothing wrong and a proper investigation would have concluded months ago, amicably, without the significant waste of taxpayer resources.”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

You may have heard Donald Trump is running for president again – but not much more than that. The former president’s new bid for the White House hasn’t quite had the vigor of his first, successful campaign in 2016, but as the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, he’s looking to change that:

Donald Trump is scheduled to venture out of his Mar-a-Lago resort and conduct a swing of presidential campaign events later this month, ramping up efforts to secure the Republican nomination after facing hefty criticism around the slow start to his 2024 White House bid, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The former US president is expected to travel to a number of early voting states for the Republican nomination – the specific states have not been finalized – around the final weekend of January, the sources said, where he is slated to announce his state level teams.

The move comes after a slow start to the campaign and an announcement speech at Mar-a-Lago that has been widely panned as “low energy” and inactive in terms of events, further knocking Trump’s political image after key Senate candidates he endorsed in November’s midterms faced embarrassing defeats.

That has apparently given enough confidence for a host of Republicans to prepare their own White House runs and though Trump says he believes a wide field will be beneficial, he seems set to face possible candidates including Florida governor Ron DeSantis and ex-cabinet officials like Nikki Haley.

In order to win their conviction against the Trump Organization, prosecutors in Manhattan first went after Allen Weisselberg, the company’s former finance chief.

Weisselberg agreed to plead guilty to 15 tax charges and cooperate with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the former president’s company. His testimony proved crucial to the guilty verdict a jury reached in December, and earlier this week, Weisselberg was given five months behind bars for accepting $1.7m in perks without paying taxes – a lenient penalty that came about only because of his cooperation.

Today, the Trump Organization is expected to be sentenced to pay $1.6m, a relatively small sum. But Bragg isn’t done with the former president. The Manhattan district attorney argued that Trump was well aware of the tax evasion going on at his organization, and is reportedly pursuing another investigation into his company, this one looking at the integrity of his financial statements.

That’s separate from New York attorney general Letitia James’s lawsuit against Trump and his children alleging fraud, which is not to be confused with the federal investigations of the government secrets found at Mar-a-Lago, his plot to overturn the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. Those are being handled by special prosecutor Jack Smith.

Trump Organization to be sentenced on tax fraud charges

Good morning, US politics blog readers. We will direct your attention this morning away from Washington DC to New York City, where Donald Trump’s business is at 9am eastern time scheduled to be sentenced on tax fraud charges. According to reports, the entity will probably be hit with fines totaling $1.6m, but that won’t be the end of the story for Trump’s legal troubles in the state. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has a lawsuit against the former president and three of his children for inflating their net worth to get better loan terms, in what her office described as “staggering” fraud.

Here’s what else is going on today:

• Joe Biden welcomes Japan’s prime minister, Kishida Fumio, to the White House this morning, before departing for Delaware.

• The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, will hold her daily briefing at 12.30pm, where reporters will no doubt demand more details on the classified documents found at two properties linked to the president.

• The House and Senate will convene briefly, but no votes are expected.