Manipulated

Trump would say what he wanted his net worth to be — then statements would be manipulated to match, Cohen says

Lauren del Valle

Donald Trump's former attorney and "fixer" Michael Cohen testified Tuesday he and former Trump Org. CFO Allen Weisselberg would manipulate the statements of financial conditions, the documents at the center of the civil fraud trial, based on what Trump wanted his net worth to reflect.

Cohen testified that Trump would tell him and Weisselberg what he wanted his total net worth to be. Then Cohen and Weisselberg would reverse engineer the asset valuations in his statements of financial condition to achieve that number.

"I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected and my responsibility along with Allen Weisselberg predominantly was to reverse engineer the various different assets classes, increase those assets in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us.”

The net worth amount they’d back into on the statements was: "Whatever number Mr. Trump told us to,” Cohen said.

Weisselberg testified earlier at trial that he doesn’t remember any meetings with Cohen and Trump to discuss Trump’s net worth or financial statements.

"I don't believe it ever happened, no,” the former CFO testified.