LEGAL/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TRUMP PEOPLE: “‘Think Allen Weisselberg,’ a person who knows Donald Trump well told me a few days ago. Even as news was breaking about the president’s personal attorney’s stunning, Trump-implicating, plea-deal admission that he had arranged hush-money payments to an ex-Playboy playmate and a porn star, it was a reminder to not lose sight of the enduring importance of the Trump Organization’s under-the-radar longtime chief financial officer. On Friday [8-24-18], it was hard not to see the wisdom of the statement. The news from the Wall Street Journal that Weisselberg was granted immunity by federal prosecutors to talk to them in their criminal investigation of flipped fixer Michael Cohen was but the latest concussive blow to Trump—an additional instance in this history-book week of a person who had been seen as unflinchingly loyal to Trump gauging the increasingly fraught legal terrain and opting to cooperate with investigators at the potential expense of the president…’Executive 1,’ prosecutors in the Cohen case called Weisselberg, according to NBC News—and it’s an apt description. Weisselberg has worked for Trump for so long he actually started working for his father—in 1973, the same year the Department of Justice filed suit against the Trumps for discriminating against nonwhite people. He is simultaneously one of the most important and least known employees who works on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. In the myriad biographies and newspaper and magazine profiles written about Trump over the past five decades, Weisselberg’s name appears with notable infrequency.”
–Michael Kruse, “Trump on Weisselberg: ‘He Did Whatever Was Necessary’,” Politico, August 24, 2018