The New York attorney general’s office has requested that a state appeals court require former President Trump to post a complete bond before temporarily halting the multimillion-dollar judgment in his civil fraud case.
According to Trump’s legal team, the former president is unable to obtain the complete bond amount, despite his diligent efforts. In a sworn affidavit attached to the filing, an insurance broker who testified for Trump during the fraud trial last year described this as a “practical impossibility.”
“In a court filing on Wednesday, Dennis Fan, senior assistant solicitor general in the attorney general’s office, argued that the defendants’ new factual allegations and legal arguments do not provide sufficient support for their request for a stay based on a bond or deposit amounting to less than one-fourth of the money-judgment.”
In 2022, a New York judge found Trump guilty of conspiring to inflate his assets for tax and insurance benefits, resulting in a $454 million judgment against him. The state had sued Trump for fraudulent business practices. Currently, Trump owes the state approximately $457 million, with interest accumulating at a rate of $112,000 per day for each day he fails to pay.
In order to appeal the judgment, Trump needs to obtain a bond. This bond would temporarily halt the enforcement of the judgment. However, in order to obtain the bond, Trump’s lawyers stated that he must post collateral that is equivalent to 120 percent of the judgment amount, which exceeds $557 million.
Rather than accepting a bond of $100 million, Trump has requested the court to consider it.
“Very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” Trump’s lawyers stated.
However, the attorney general’s office stated that this is not accurate.
Fan contended that there is no regulation requiring Trump to borrow a single bond from a single surety for the entire judgment amount and that the former president may split the multimillion-dollar bond among numerous sureties to lessen “any individual surety’s risk.”
He told the court that the insurance broker named in Trump’s motion, Gary Giulietti, was found to lack credibility by Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the fraud trial, due to an “ongoing personal and professional relationship with Donald Trump.”
The state lawyer also refuted Trump’s assertion that his numerous properties cannot serve as collateral, asserting that it is “hardly impossible” to use real estate as collateral.
“Defendants’ allegations thus boil down to the proposition that sureties have been unwilling to accept Mr. Trump’s real estate holdings as collateral in this case,” Fan wrote in an email. “Yet defendants provide no documentary evidence demonstrating what real property they provided to sureties, on what terms, or why the sureties refused to take the assets.”
“As far as the Court can infer, sureties may have refused to accept defendants’ specific holdings as collateral because using Mr. Trump’s real estate will generally require ‘a property appraisal’ and his holdings are not nearly as valuable as defendants claim,” he went on to say.
Trump’s bail deadline is Monday, the same day his first criminal trial was supposed to start in Manhattan before a last-minute document dump postponed the proceedings.
If he cannot come up with the funds, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) can begin to enforce Engoron’s judgment by seizing Trump’s assets, which could include some of his most renowned Manhattan properties, such as Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street.
