The Daily Fuckup

On Oct. 24, 2021, the Trump Organization’s New York tax case was not in trial. The matter was still in the pretrial phase after a July 2021 indictment charged Trump Corporation, Trump Payroll Corporation and longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg in a scheme prosecutors said involved off-the-books compensation, tax fraud and falsified business records. Weisselberg also faced grand larceny counts. The case was moving toward trial, but jurors had not been selected and no evidence had been heard.

The legal pressure on the company was already real. Prosecutors had accused the corporate defendants and Weisselberg of treating fringe benefits and other compensation as hidden pay, with tax filings that allegedly underreported what employees received. The indictment did not charge Donald Trump himself, but it put the company’s payroll and accounting practices under a criminal lens and left the case headed into a slower stretch of pretrial litigation.

By late October 2021, the most important fact was timing: the case was still building toward a 2022 trial, not resolving itself in court. The record available from New York courts later reflected that the dispute remained active into 2022, but that later litigation does not change the basic posture on Oct. 24, 2021. The Trump Organization and Weisselberg were under indictment, the case was still alive, and the first trial date remained ahead.