Married to the Mob

A new report reveals how lucrative life is for Trump witnesses whose silence may have been bought.

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To understand Trump, we need to understand how a mob boss operates. A key point is this: He keeps people with direct knowledge of his criminality close, and he often buys their silence with all that illegally gotten money.

A mob boss like Trump is head of a criminal enterprise, so when the authorities come calling, employees characteristically clam up. Sometimes they’re scared to talk, and sometimes they’re induced into silence. That appears to be the case with several key witnesses against Trump.

According to a bombshell report by ProPublica, which combed through reams of public filings from the Trump Campaign and Truth Social, a number of individuals with direct knowledge of Trump’s crimes received lucrative bonuses, promotions and grants of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.

Some saw their average monthly pay double. One received a $2 million “severance” package barring him from voluntarily cooperating. And one had her daughter hired at the Trump Campaign, becoming the fourth highest salaried person in the organization. 

Today, I’ll lay out what ProPublica discovered and then address the most obvious question: Isn’t this highly illegal? Spoiler alert: The answer is yes, quite likely it is, but the next logical question is tougher. Is there enough to warrant further investigations and charges?

Loyalty pays

Boris Epshteyn is involved in many of the Trump cases as a witness and sometimes as a co-defendant. He worked with Kenneth Chesebro to put the fake elector scheme together, leaving a trail of emails and texts that are quite damning for Trump and his co-conspirators. He’s had his phone seized by the FBI, been interviewed by the Special Counsel’s office, and testified before the grand jury in Georgia.

According to ProPublica, before Jack Smith charged Trump in August 2023 with trying to overturn the election, Epshteyn was receiving around $26K a month from the Trump Campaign. But then his pay shot up, nearly doubling to $50K the month after the indictment, then climbing to $53K where it has remained. Curious timing there, especially since Epshteyn doesn’t work full time for the campaign and even landed a new role as managing director at a financial services firm in New York in November.

Let’s look next at Susie Wiles. You may not have heard of her before, but she’s head of the whole Trump Campaign. She’s also a key witness in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Wiles was in the room when Trump waved around classified documents, showing them to people without proper security clearance. In fact, she’s the “PAC representative” referred to in Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida to whom Trump showed a map of military operations, acknowledging that he “should not be showing it” and warning her to not “get too close.”

If you’re thinking that sounds like an admission that Trump knew he held classified documents still and had not actually mass declassified them as he claimed, you are correct. How ironic, yet unsurprising, that the woman who could help put Trump in prison for espionage is his campaign manager. 

Trump was indicted for the classified documents retention in June of 2023. Guess which month Wiles’s political consulting firm received its highest ever monthly payment of $75K from the Trump Campaign? Ding ding ding! June of 2023. It’s only ever hit that amount one other time since. 

Wiles also gave herself a raise of 20 percent that May, from $25K to $30K per month. “She went back and redid her contract,” said a campaign official. Again, what a coincidence. And then even better for Wiles, her daughter who reportedly couldn’t pass a background check at her other job got hired by the campaign at a whopping $222,000, making her the fourth highest paid staffer. 

Another Trump aide and witness who saw Trump waving around classified documents is Margo Martin. The indictment alleges that Trump told Martin, who was recording the meeting, and others that the military document he was showing off was “secret” and “highly confidential.” He went even further, saying “As president, I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

Yes, this is also a confession. Perhaps for her silence, and just a few months before her own grand jury testimony, Martin received a 20 percent pay raise in a job with the campaign, going from $155k to $185K per year.

There are others. Dan Scavino, who helps Trump with his social media posts, got a consulting gig that paid out $240K and, between being subpoenaed and testifying, a seat on the board of Trump Social. From that he got a $600K retention bonus and a $4 million “executive promissory note” paid in shares.

Jennifer Little represented Trump briefly in the documents case and had advised him that he couldn’t ignore the subpoena. She got called before the grand jury but seemed not to recall key details of her meeting with Trump, including that he had suggested that they not “play ball” with the authorities. After her testimony, Trump’s PAC paid her $218K, and she has since made $1.3 million working as an attorney for Trump.

And we shouldn’t overlook Trump’s CFO, Allen Weisselberg, who received a $2 million severance agreement that includes a non-disparagement clause and a clause barring him from voluntarily cooperating with authorities. As ProPublica noted, that agreement was one of the reasons prosecutors didn’t call Weisselberg as a witness, as he was still due $750K under the agreement and likely wouldn’t cooperate.

Isn’t this all really illegal?

There’s a reason white collar defense attorneys advise their clients not to pay any unusual benefits or suddenly penalize any employees who might become witnesses against them in a criminal matter. Rather, as the experts interviewed by ProPublica noted, a neutral board should make these decisions so that it doesn’t rise to the level of witness tampering.

In some instances, the evidence that Trump obstructed justice seems pretty solid already. In the Mar-a-Lago documents case, for example, there is evidence that Trump instructed other defendants to erase video footage recording their movement of classified documents.

With these paid-off witnesses, and even just based upon the public filings, there is now plenty of circumstantial evidence that, once added up, could make for a solid case of witness tampering. And what went on privately within a private company like the Trump Organization, or among its hundreds of shell companies, might reveal far more damaging evidence if authorities could get their hands on it.

But let’s not hold our breath

The Trump Campaign and Truth Social of course tell a very different story. As they insisted to ProPublica, all of these payouts, promotions and positions were given in recognition of the hard work that these employees and consultants put in. The payments went up as the workload increased, especially as the investigations and cases heated up. There’s no basis, they claim, for ascribing improper or illegal motive to any of it.

And here’s the hard part: Trump’s minions already know what they have to do if the boss wants someone taken care of. No conversations have to happen, and Trump leaves very little to no paper trail. As a well-oiled criminal enterprise, when authorities come calling, everyone falls in line, and everyone expects to be rewarded for it.

Just as was the case with Trump’s fraudulent financial statements and business falsification charges, proving that Trump was directly involved will therefore be difficult for lack of a credible witness who can point the finger at Trump. Everyone who is closest to Trump is either a defendant already or a convicted criminal, rendering their testimony vulnerable to impeachment. It’s not impossible to nail him, as the Manhattan DA’s office just did, but it is tricky.

Putting pressure on witnesses is par for the course for Trump. In response to congressional investigations over January 6, Trump-aligned lawyers put pressure on Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide to his former chief of staff, to not remember certain details. And top Trump aide Roger Stone even went to prison for witness tampering, but was later pardoned by Trump.

If there’s a silver lining here, it is this: When the other cases finally get to trial and should these witnesses testify favorably for Trump, the prosecution will be ready with receipts. After all, based solely on what ProPublica has already unearthed, it will be fairly easy for prosecutors to call into question their veracity because they are hopelessly tainted and conflicted by all the money flowing to them from their criminal boss.

Down the road, assuming Trump doesn’t regain the levers of power, it might finally be time to bring federal RICO charges against everyone in the Trump orbit who is grifting from the base, pressuring witnesses and laundering money. RICO exists as a way to get around the problem of criminal enterprises that leave no direct trail to the boss. But as we’re learning in Georgia, bringing a RICO case is a complicated business, and even getting far more straightforward cases against Trump to trial has proven maddening with a MAGA-friendly federal judge in Florida and an insurrection adjacent pair of radicals on the Supreme Court. 

This shouldn’t discourage investigators from looking deeper, however. ProPublica has once again, and heroically, lifted the rock and revealed the worms wiggling beneath it. The Trump Campaign is so mad about the report that they have already threatened to sue. Now it’s up to our elected officials to launch further investigations and our federal and state authorities to bring witness tampering charges if the evidence, even if largely circumstantial, ultimately supports them.