Donald Trump’s chief financial officer surrendered to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office early Thursday morning, ahead of the announcement of charges against both himself and the Trump Organization. The charges faced by Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization are reported to center on unpaid taxes on lavish benefits—from Mercedes-Benzes to free apartments to private school tuition—Weisselberg and his family received. The specifics are expected to be unsealed Thursday afternoon. 

The investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James is ongoing, so whatever is announced Thursday may not be the end of the problems for the Trump Organization. But even these relatively minor charges could affect the Trump Organization’s relationships with its lenders.

The Trump Organization predictably cried witch hunt, saying in a statement that Weisselberg is  being used as a “pawn in a scorched-earth attempt to harm the former president.” 

”The district attorney is bringing a criminal prosecution involving employee benefits that neither the I.R.S. or any other district attorney would ever think of bringing,” the statement continued. “This is not justice; this is politics.”

The fact that the IRS doesn’t bring more tax evasion cases against wealthy and powerful people is a problem, not a precedent to continue. In fact, the IRS has admitted to Congress that it audits poor people at the same rate as rich people because it’s easier, and the agency doesn’t have enough resources to sift through all the records of the wealthiest people. So, yes, the Trump Organization and its wealthy leaders could doubtless have gotten away with a lot of illegal activity for decades more if Donald Trump hadn’t gone and drawn attention to what they were doing by boosting his campaign for president with hush-money payments to women he’d had affairs with, which in turn drew investigations that spread to other of the Trump Organization’s financial dealings.

Trump is reportedly excited that the charges aren’t more serious, with one of his unnamed advisers coming off a Monday call convinced that “Now he’s definitely going to run for president.”

Former campaign adviser Sam Nunberg said of Team Trump’s pushback on the charges, “It’s going to be a two-pronged message: the message for political public consumption and then the PR message against the substance of the case itself.” Is anyone taking bets on whether Trump will get up at a rally and admit to not paying taxes on these specific things, billing it as the smartest thing to do?

In the short term, we’ll learn what charges Weisselberg and the Trump Organization face. In the medium term, the question is whether prosecutors can get Weisselberg to cooperate the investigation, and whether the charges will have any impact on the Trump Organization’s ability to do business. And, of course, will more charges follow?