Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

“Think Allen Weisselberg,” a person who knows Donald Trump well told me a few days ago. Even as news was breaking about the president’s personal attorney’s stunning, Trump-implicating, plea-deal admission that he had arranged hush-money payments to an ex-Playboy playmate and a porn star, it was a reminder to not lose sight of the enduring importance of the Trump Organization’s under-the-radar longtime chief financial officer.

On Friday, it was hard not to see the wisdom of the statement. The news from the Wall Street Journal that Weisselberg was granted immunity by federal prosecutors to talk to them in their criminal investigation of flipped fixer Michael Cohen was but the latest concussive blow to Trump—an additional instance in this history-book week of a person who had been seen as unflinchingly loyal to Trump gauging the increasingly fraught legal terrain and opting to cooperate with investigators at the potential expense of the president.


“I don’t think Allen would do anything illegal,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res said Friday afternoon, “but I know he would not go to jail for Donald.”

“Executive 1,” prosecutors in the Cohen case called Weisselberg, according to NBC News—and it’s an apt description. Weisselberg has worked for Trump for so long he actually started working for his father—in 1973, the same year the Department of Justice filed suit against the Trumps for discriminating against nonwhite people. He is simultaneously one of the most important and least known employees who works on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. In the myriad biographies and newspaper and magazine profiles written about Trump over the past five decades, Weisselberg’s name appears with notable infrequency. He seldom speaks on the record. Others in Trump’s orbit talk only so much about him.

The person who’s probably said the most, actually, is Trump himself. And some of what he’s shared has a new and interesting resonance now.

“Allen Weisselberg, my chief financial officer,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, Think Like a Billionaire, “has to be one of the toughest people in business when it comes to money. When I was having some financial problems in the early 1990s, I called Allen into my office and told him there would be tough times ahead. The banks were about to cut off our funding. Allen said, ‘No problem,’ and went back to his office, where he proceeded to renegotiate almost every payment from that point forward.”

“Some financial problems” understates the severity of what Trump faced at that moment. He was billions of dollars in debt, and there was every possibility he would be financially ruined, in all likelihood irreparably. The top takeaway for Trump about Weisselberg: “He did whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line”—and here’s where I found myself on Friday double-underlining words—“and refused to succumb to the pressures of risk.”

Trump considered Weisselberg an ideal employee—loyal above all else.

“I think the reason we have so many loyal people is that we reward loyalty, and everybody knows this,” he said in his 2007 book, Think Big. “It has become part of the corporate culture of The Trump Organization. People like Allen Weisselberg and Matt Calamari are great and have proven themselves over many years.”

Part and parcel of such longevity when working for Trump always has been a willingness to adapt to his preferences and idiosyncrasies.

“Whoever works for me has to move fast. That’s how I work, and my employees must follow suit,” he noted in his 2007 book, Trump 101, and also nearly verbatim in his 2009 book, Think Like a Champion. He wanted to know what he needed to know, Trump explained, even “the most complex matters,” preferably “in 10 words or less.” Weisselberg, he said, could be that “succinct.” He also called him “focused” and “thorough.”

In his 2011 book, Midas Touch, written with Robert T. Kiyosaki, Trump praised his pessimism as well. “My CFO, Allen Weisselberg, who has been with me for over 30 years, advised to ‘operate your day-to-day business as if bad times are always here,’ which is a great precaution,” he wrote.

For his part, Weisselberg is mostly a ghost in biographies of Trump. In Robert Slater’s No Such Thing as Over-Exposure, a flattering, business-oriented biography published in 2005, Weisselberg said flattering, business-oriented things about his boss, casting him as a can-do tycoon who had surpassed the considerable accomplishments of his father. Fred Trump, Weisselberg told Slater, “built typical brick buildings which didn’t have the flash of bronze and marble.” Donald Trump, on the other hand? “He respected what his father did and thought he was a brilliant man, but he had higher ideals, a bigger picture in mind.”

That same year, Weisselberg granted an interview to Tim O’Brien, then a reporter for the New York Times. O’Brien’s reporting was telling him that Trump wasn’t worth as much as he said he was. Weisselberg met with him in a conference room in Trump Tower. He said Trump was worth $6 billion and handed O’Brien a tally of assets—that added up to $5 billion. When O’Brien pointed out the discrepancy, Weisselberg stood up.

“I’m going to go to my office and find that other billion,” he said.

He never returned.

Last month, on a leaked audiotape of a conversation with Trump about how to pay to quash a story about his alleged affair with the Playboy model, Cohen said Weisselberg’s name and mentioned his involvement. O’Brien pegged it immediately as significant.

“Weisselberg isn’t a bit player in Trumplandia,” wrote O’Brien, the author of TrumpNation and now the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, “and his emergence on the Cohen-Trump recording—as someone possibly facilitating a scheme apparently meant to disguise a payoff—should worry the president.”

Why?

Back to the bookshelf.

And cue Corey Lewandowski—Trump’s first campaign manager.

“Allen Weisselberg,” he wrote in the 2017 book he co-authored with David Bossie, Let Trump be Trump, “… knows of every dime that leaves the building.”