The Daily Fuckup

The Trump Organization did not wait until the calendar flipped to carry a criminal conviction into 2023. On Dec. 6, 2022, a Manhattan jury found the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation guilty on 17 counts in a New York tax-fraud case brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The verdict capped a trial over how the company handled compensation and benefits for top employees, including off-the-books perks and records that prosecutors said were used to conceal the real payments.

The case centered on whether those benefits were treated honestly in the books and on tax forms. Prosecutors said the organization kept part of the pay package outside normal payroll systems while disguising it through false records. The jury rejected the company’s defense and sided with the prosecution on every count submitted to it. That result did not mean the whole business had been dissolved or formally designated as a criminal enterprise. It meant two Trump entities were convicted in a criminal case, with sentencing and the size of any financial penalty left for later.

Attorney General Letitia James said after the verdict that the case showed organizations cannot violate the law to enrich insiders. Her office said the scheme involved avoiding taxes through hidden compensation and falsified business records. The conviction came after years of scrutiny of the Trump business world and added a concrete criminal finding to a broader pile of legal fights over the company’s finances, recordkeeping, and claims about its own success.

The practical consequences were still ahead at year’s end. The company had not yet been sentenced, and the court later set a Jan. 13, 2023, sentencing date. But the biggest shift had already happened: the Trump Organization was not heading into the new year as merely accused. It was heading into it as a company a jury had already convicted in a tax case, with the legal and political fallout still working through the system.