Lawyers for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) have filed an appeal with the New York appellate court that he is not able to come up with the bond that is required to appeal the judgment that judge Arthur Engoron issued against him, by the deadline of Monday, March 25th. This falsifies SSAT’s repeated boasts that he is very wealthy and has plenty of cash that would allow him to post any bond.
Donald Trump’s lawyers told a New York appellate court Monday that it’s impossible for him to post a bond covering the full amount of his $454m civil fraud judgment while he appeals.
The former president’s lawyers wrote in a court filing that “obtaining an appeal bond in the full amount” of the judgment “is not possible under the circumstances presented”.
With interest, Trump owes $456.8m. In all, he and co-defendants including his company and top executives owe $467.3m. To obtain a bond, they would be required to post collateral worth $557m, Trump’s lawyers said.
A state appeals court judge ruled last month that Trump must post a bond covering the full amount to pause enforcement of the judgment, which is to begin on 25 March.
…A real estate broker enlisted by Trump to assist in obtaining a bond wrote in an affidavit filed with the court that few bonding companies will consider issuing a bond of the size required.
The remaining bonding companies will not “accept hard assets such as real estate as collateral” but “will only accept cash or cash equivalents (such as marketable securities)”.
“A bond of this size is rarely, if ever, seen. In the unusual circumstance that a bond of this size is issued, it is provided to the largest public companies in the world, not to individuals or privately held businesses,” the broker, Gary Giulietti, wrote.
…New York attorney general Letitia James, a Democrat, has said that she will seek to seize some of Trump’s assets if the Republican is unable to pay the judgment.
Trump would receive an automatic stay if he were to put up money, assets or an appeal bond covering what he owes. He also had the option, which he’s now exercising, to ask the appeals court to grant a stay with a bond for a lower amount.
Trump maintains that he is worth several billion dollars and testified last year that he had about $400m in cash, in addition to properties and other investments.
SSAT has said through his lawyers that they had been turned down by 30 different surety companies approached through four different brokers. I must say that I am enjoying the mental image of him going around from one bond company to another with hat in hand begging them to back him and having them show him the door.
I do not know if this latest appeal by SSAT goes to Engoron again. During the trial, SSAT repeatedly attacked Engoron and his clerk in the media, implying that they were dishonest and biased. He also viciously attacked New York attorney general Letitia James. That kind of intemperate language is not likely to make Engoron or James sympathetic to his case and to agree to a deal to lower the bond to the $100 million that SSAT has requested.
If Trump had the billions he claimed to he could find a way to make this work. There are big companies and wealthy Republicans that will take real estate as collateral and he has had some time to put together a deal. I would guess the nominal price of his land is enough but some combination of Trump waiting too long to get such a big complex deal together, his refusing to accept other companies valuation of his property, him already having loans on his real estate and him only owning parts of his real estate made it impossible to get a deal by the deadline.
Assuming he is telling the truth at all. Trump’s lawyers appealed the previous smaller bond after he had signed for the bond. So don’t entirely discount Trump’s lawyers turning up with the bond Monday morning at the deadline. Trump and his lawyers have reached the file anything that might delay the case stage.
So here you have a person who apparently has a habit of not paying people. And now you have bond companies demanding cash or cash equivalents as collateral.
Plus the bond is to cover a fraud conviction. Makes you wonder if those things are perhaps related?
Or maybe he doesn’t really own as much real estate as he claims, and everything is already mortgaged to the hilt?
It also occurred to me that Trump has a chunk tied up in Truth Social that he legally can’t use right now. Contract and SEC rules requires that it sits there until some time after the merger goes through. I have no idea if the court can try to get that money before Trump is allowed to sell it. If the deal goes through at full value this will be a couple of billion for Trump when he is allowed to sell them.
Does anyone really think that after being found guilty for lying about the value of his real estate assets that anyone would accept those assets as collateral for an appeal in the same suit which found he lied about those assets?
Does anyone think that Trump learned something about why lying about the value of your assets is a bad idea, not just to other investors, but also for Trump?
I’m not really enjoying the mental image of what’s going to happen to those bond companies and the people who work for them when he wins in November. They’ve all become his enemies. That isn’t a problem today, but all joking about dementia and cognitive decline aside, Trump might forget who Barack Obama was and when he was president, but you can bet what you like that Trump remembers people who don’t kiss his ring.
And right now, today, on as-accurate-as-any-polling-website polling website 538.com, the polls say Biden has a 43% chance of a win, and Trump has a 43% chance of a win. When I looked at the page just now, there were thirty five poll results from the last week or so.
Of those 35, three were dead even and four had Biden winning. All the rest predict a Trump win.
If I were unfortunate enough to have to live in the US, I’d be making my plan to leave now. I was confident a year ago the Trump would do better than people here thought he would -- I was confident he’d be the candidate (I was right) and I was confident he’d poll more than 50 million votes.
A year on, it’s worse than that. Right now, I think he’s got a better than even chance of winning. If you don’t -- please, I implore you, present your evidence. Convince me why he can’t win. I’d really like to be able to write him off.
He learned which bond companies he’ll be targeting in his first week as President next year. That’s all.
It’s very possible that he has the assets and can pay, but is just doing his usual playbook -- delay, lie, eventually exasperate the other parties enough that the accept a lesser amount just to be done with it. Whether that is appropriate here or not is likely immaterial to him.
@5 sonofrojblake — Ditching the US isn’t so easy. Americans can’t just walk into another country and tear up their social security cards. The long arm of the Feds continues to take its tithes and retain its right to you, your family, and your assets, not to mention the generally hefty cost of emigration in both cash and marketable skills (although one might get away with moving to someplace like Haiti on the cheap). The starry-eyed heydays of “I’ll just flee to Canada and escape this nonsense!” isn’t reasonable anymore for most of us.
How expensive is it to live in a dictatorship?
The way to really profit from real estate is to borrow as much as you can on it, buy more and repeat. But fraudulently inflating the value of your assets to borrow still more is a dangerous game. It can mean that everything you “own” is worth little more, perhaps even less, than you owe on it. Then if a really big debt happens that you can’t settle, your creditors may force fire sales in which your heavily mortgaged assets sell for a song, and your whole empire collapses like a house of cards. Wishful thinking, but wouldn’t that be great! Surely it would be the political end for SSAT. But maybe not. He has weathered six bankruptcies,
I do think the appeals court will lower the bond, and just as importantly, the whole procedure will chew up time. SSAT just needs to keep stalling until after the election.
He has to post the bond in order to appeal, and I strongly doubt the NY district court has any interest in letting him post anything but the current full amount due.
He certainly hasn’t offered any compelling legal justification why the bond should be reduced in order for him to appeal the judgement.
Considering Trump’s standard business practices, just about everything he owns -- virtually certainly anything with a value close to his immediate liabilities -- is already used as collateral for one or more previous obligations.
In such cases, even if some daredevil lender(s) would take a chance on it, they’d probably need the agreement of the prior lender -- hoo! hah!
I wonder if DJT ever realizes his whole palace of cards would surely still stand strong if he hadn’t given in to the urge for that wild-ass publicity stunt starting on that escalator in 2015.
Pierce, he has for sure been 100% dominating the news cycle starting on that escalator in 2015, so who cares what might have been?
He’s famous, he’s prominent, people talk about him. Just as you are doing right now.
So. He might realise he might have remained a vague celebrity, had he not jumped to the front of the public consciousness and basically wrapped the Republican party of the USA around his little finger.
(Or toadstool-wang, whichever)
re Pierce R. Butler @11: I have said before that I really want The Orange Criminal to curse the day that he decided to run for president. Before that, he was an obnoxious, racist, misogynistic, grifting criminal that was living large on his “business acumen”, but he was running under the radar. The presidency brought a whole new light to his criminal ways, and he is finding out that there are some people that he just can’t bully or con. I personally find it highly amusing that his past behaviors are coming back to bite him in the ass. (I would love for E. Jean Carroll to hit him with another $100 million lawsuit because he just can’t keep his stupid mouth shut.)
@13: I want bad people to get what they deserve, too. I’ll start to find it amusing when (a) he starts paying and (b) he loses the election and there isn’t a repeat of January 6th but worse.
Sadly, I’d have more confidence predicting this -- he’ll never learn his lesson, he’ll win the election, and he’ll die in office and not, as he deserves to, in jail.
SSAT dissed Taylor Swift some weeks ago. Today I found a Youtube photo of Swift with the text “she could really write a cheque for 460 million $”.
The irony is beautiful.
Farron Cousins:
“Broke Trump Forced To Cancel Rallies Because He Can’t Afford Them Anymore”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=CNQht2-IEoI
The downside is we get fewer of Trump’s revealing brain farts on camera.
It seems to me that Trump is a remarkably stupid person who is suffering from dementia, ignorance, and unscrupulous lawyers who are willing to take his money but can’t convince him how screwed he is. The bond(s), you should recall, are necessary in New York in order to allow an appeal. For someone to put up the bond they must believe that Trump is good for the money and that he has better than a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the appeal. Which, he does not. So what is going on?
Trump thought he would delay the judgements and payouts until he could become president again and could install a new AG and apply whatever pressure he could to get the case dismissed or the judgement reversed on appeal. That scenario is also looking mighty snowball in hellish. So putting up the bond means another chance to throw the dice and hope that he can hide enough money from the bond-holder to keep his lifestyle and reputation once he loses the appeals -- after all, with the bond, the money is all in one place where it can be siezed, and then he has to work it out with his creditors, as he has done so many times before.
The other problem is that he may be mostly margined out on his debts. Remember how he pays zero taxes? His method of cheating that was to completely offset his profits with losses. If he’s underwater on some of his properties (he genuinely seems to have no idea what they are worth, which is way less than he says) -- he’s a one-man debt bubble and if NY starts enforcing the judgement he may “unwind” i.e: worth goes negative or underwater.
I hope Judge Engoron has been enjoying a side order of iced revenge with his breakfast. Trump bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain unsinkable cruise ship that hit an iceberg. It takes a while for the lower holds to flood.
All of this is well and good but to extend mjr’s metaphor -- right now he’s surrounded by icebergs. There have been worrying scraping sounds.
But has even one drop of water got actually inside the hull yet?
Has he paid *anyone* a cent?
The whole “fewer rallies” thing sounds promising, but in the words of Winston Wolf lets not start sucking each others dicks just yet.
I can’t wait for his comeuppance, but i and everyone else are going to have to, because reports of it having already started have been going on for about six years, with anoticeable uptick in the last six months.
Why can’t it just… start?
The $91 million bond for the E. Jean Carroll case is fully secured, and clearly cost the defamer his liquid assets. I haven’t checked to see if the filing discloses exactly what was given to the Bonding company as collateral, but most of them do not accept real estate.
The civil fraud case has another week for the fraudster to come up with about 900 million to post bond on an appeal. 30 of the bonding companies including Chub, (who issued the E Jean bond) have told him to pound sand, because he doesn’t have enough cash or other assets to secure that amount. They are bankers, and there is some irony to watch the man who is famous for not paying his debts being denied a bond to appeal his fraud case, because his credit scores show him to be a terrible financial risk. It’s quite compelling reality tv, can’t wait to see what crazy plot twists happen before his deadline.
Jury selection in his NY criminal case starts March 25th, and it was just ruled that both Stormy Daniel’s and Michael Kohn can testify; AND the Access Hollywood tape about p-grabbing is admissible.
These are just the beginning of his legal woes, and while having enough wealth to employ in-house lawyers does tend to drag the process out interminably, he has, and will continue to lose when the trial(s) begin.
Sonofrojblake @ 18
My analogy: The communist regimes in GDR, Romania etc looked secure, right up to the point where they collapsed. The populist guy who ran Italy (and was as corrupt as Trump) not all that long ago seemed indestructibe…until he wasn’t .
And don’t start me on the Thatcher -- era tories who must have made a pact with the devil, hanging on and on. Suddenly, they too were gone.
birgerjohansson, quite the poor analogy there.
Now, were Trump a dictator running a regime, it might make sense.
(You do get he is not the incumbent, right?)
Um, they’ve held Government since 2010. That’s fourteen continuous years in power.
Still in power right now. Unlike Trump.
Again, a stupid attempt at analogy. Not even slightly comparable.
Has he paid *anyone* a cent?
Yup. About $12mn in legal fees so far. But more importantly, the $ are not flooding into the republican party any more. He has set it up so he can use it as a piggybank, and the donors responded by stopping donating. The big donors did a while ago and the small donors seem to be tired of sending their meth money to his legal slush fund. The fact that he’s having trouble getting bonds and the donations are tanking is the inrushing water in the hold. Once he has no money he’ll lose his real estate, and that’ll sink him. He did manage to get Chubb to stick their chubbie out but there is absolutely no way he will win either case on appeal -- he’s just trying to delay delay delay and it is finally sinking in to his donors that that’s not what a falsely accused billionaire does.
@Tethys, 19: I did not know that. Great news, thank you! Except… has she seen any of that money? See below.
@birgerjohansson, 20: I won’t start you on the Thatcher-era Tories, because you clearly don’t know and may be (?) too young to remember that there was anything but “sudden” about them going. I lived through it -- the writing was on the wall for them in 1990 when there was widespread rioting in London over the poll tax… but it was over SEVEN YEARS before they were out. It certainly didn’t feel “sudden”. And lest we forget, their children got back into power in 2010, and are once again dead men (and women) walking towards another electoral wipeout that can’t come soon enough and certainly won’t seem “sudden” when it does.
@mjr, 23: I should have been more specific -- I meant has he paid any of his enemies. So far, per Tethys @19, he’s put some money into a court, money he’ll get back when he’s President/dictator-for-life and can simply take it (or so he seems to imagine, and I wouldn’t bet against it…). Money paid to his enablers doesn’t count -- it’s the cost of doing business, right?
One point I don’t think I’ve seen addressed: everybody’s talking about “his” real estate, but how much of it is actually his, in the narrow, legal sense? Is his name really on the deeds? I would imagine that it’s all owned by limited liability companies, which are distinct legal entities in their own right, even if they are eventually under Trump’s beneficial control. And I’d also expect that control to be somewhat obfuscated and difused by at least a couple of layers of offshore holding companies. That’s just how these things are usually structured -- at least, by anybody with any kind of sense.
The whole point of these sorts of arrangements is to avoid the possibility of having assets liable to personal taxation, or seized to pay debts -- you structure the corporate entities a bit like the compartments in a oil tanker, so that even if one is holed by an iceberg, the damage is limited to just that one compartment, and doesn’t sink the entire edifice.
He’ll be motivated to shift these obfuscated assets because if he doesn’t, the things they’ll take from him will be things he cares about -- things he actually can be shown to own. Cars, homes etc.
All of which assumes facts not in evidence, I’ll admit -- that it’ll ever come to that, and that he cares about anything in the usual sense.
He’ll be motivated to shift these obfuscated assets because if he doesn’t…
Part of the beauty of real estate is that it appreciates tax-free until you sell or transfer it.
Part of why Trump is so freaked out is that he has been living tax free for decades but will face scrutiny for tax liability if he liquidates anything to pay the judgements against him. If he has any profits in his portfolio they’ll get eroded by tax debt and the sales are not concealable.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the commercial real estate market is absolutely in the toilet right now, thanks to the dislocations of covid and the mass shift to WFH / hybrid working. OK, that mostly applies to offices, but it’s going to have repercussions across the whole market. A lot of valuations are underwater -- even the ones which weren’t fraudulent originally. See, for example, Office loans ‘living on borrowed time’ [FT Alphaville, registration may be required].
This is the worst possible time to be trying to sell (or raise money against) commercial real estate in a hurry.
Dumbo doesn’t have control over his various business assets in NY for 3 years, due to his love of defrauding. They are being overseen by a retired judge as independent monitor and the court ordered compliance director.
I don’t know if his NY real estate is worth the nearly 500 million he currently needs to deposit with the court in order to appeal that judgement? I know that he collects a lot of rent from those properties, and any condos owned by him sell for significantly less than a comparable property owned by anyone else. New Yorkers really hate the scumbag.
He incurred 15k in fines this year for making asshole statements about the Judges clerk, which is on top of the 110k fine from May 2022 for contempt.
In addition, he lost his bogus defamation suit against the New York Times and has to pay 392.6k in legal fees for filing such a frivolous case. I’m sure those fines will be collected, if they haven’t already been paid.
Odd how all those details of his year of losing bigly never seem to dominate the news cycles.
In any case, even if he somehow managed to get elected POTUS again, he cannot stop any of the court cases brought against him by individual states.
I had not considered that he could somehow compromise the AGs of NY or Georgia in order to dismiss cases. An appeal needs to have actual legal justification, so while it is his right to appeal assuming he can secure a bond, it is highly unlikely that he would win. I think it’s slightly more likely it could be reduced, but not enough to cancel out the interest that will accrue in the time it would take to appeal the judgement.
How unfair evil judge target orange leader’s deserved wealth! Come on all you patriots, we’re having a whip-round. Save Trump Tower!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/21/trump-fundraising-fraud-bond
Unfortunately I was right (for once)