The Trump Organization’s longtime controller returned to the witness stand Monday as a witness for the defense at Donald Trump’s financial fraud trial and continued to downplay his role in the fraudulent financial statements central to the case.
Jeffrey McConney, accused in the $250 million lawsuit alongside Trump and his high-ranking execs, again laid responsibility on the company’s outside accountants.
“Whatever he asked for, we would do,” McConney claimed of Donald Bender from the Mazars accounting firm, saying he relied on the accountant for “a lot.”
“We provided him everything he needed,” he later testified.
McConney is described in New York Attorney General Tish James’ case as playing a pivotal role in the years-long scheme to falsely inflate Trump’s bottom line by billions to profit in business deals illegally.
As deputy to ex-Trump Org finance chief Allen Weisselberg, he prepared the calculations behind the figures in yearly statements tallying Trump’s net worth from 2011 to 2017, according to the state’s case, and supervised and approved the process after Trump was elected until his retirement in 2022.
McConney’s data spreadsheets breaking down the valuations, known internally as “Jeff Supporting Data,” are described in the AG’s case as a “principal locus” of Trump and his associates’ fraud. After calculating the numbers with input from the Trump kids, the AG says, he provided them to Mazars to format into statements used in loan applications and other lucrative...
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