Nobody Wants To Let Trump Hold Half A Billion Dollars To Bond Out Of Civil Fraud Judgment

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(Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images)

This morning Trump’s lawyers informed the First Judicial Department that their client has tried and failed to get someone — anyone! — to front the $550 million it will take to stay enforcement of the judgment in his civil fraud case.

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TL, DR: The guy who was found liable for lying about the value of his assets can’t get anyone to accept those assets as collateral for a loan, so he’s throwing himself on the mercy of the Appellate Division.

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The filing is a mix of chutzpah, whining, and churn. The thousands of pages of leases, transcripts, and pointless exhibits pushed the document to 4,919 pages and managed to briefly crash New York’s ECF system this morning.

The defendant began by rubbishing the trial court’s ruling, once again attributing to Justice Arthur Engoron an eight-figure valuation for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago social club.

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“Supreme Court ridiculously valued Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, as being worth ‘between $18 million and $27.6 million,’ understating its actual value by about 50 to 100 times,” he whined, conveniently omitting to mention that this number came from a Palm Beach County tax appraisal, which he agreed to because it meant his tax bill would go down. The fact that he did it while simultaneously telling lenders that the property was worth a billion dollars is exactly why he’s in this mess in the first place.

Trump went on to howl that the penalty painstakingly explained in the trial court’s ruling, down to the dollar, violates the Constitution:

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These errors establish that the disgorgement award is unconstitutional. It is “grossly disproportional” in violation of the Excessive Fines Clause of the United States Constitution and a parallel clause of the New York Constitution, as well as basic principles of due process and selective prosecution. Because the judgment is unconstitutionally excessive, the bond requirement violates the Eighth Amendment as well, because it imposes an irrational, punitive sanction.

He also repeated his multiply rejected argument that fraudulent financial statements submitted annually to banks don’t count when the original notes are outside the statute of limitations. The AG originally sought to bring the time-barred transactions in, claiming that the required annual disclosures brought the old notes forward. When the appellate court blocked that, Trump has tried to backdoor yoga the ruling into a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card for his yearly round of lies to lenders.

But then the motion gets to the real meat of the matter, which is that his assets are so illiquid — and presumably so encumbered — that he can’t get anyone to accept them as surety.

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The Trump Organization’s longtime lawyer Alan Garten attests that more than 30 surety companies rebuffed Trump’s overtures. Chubb, which fronted the $91 million to stay collections in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, appears to have backed out of a tentative deal to underwrite the note here.

While Defendants had been actively negotiating a bond collateralized by both liquid assets and real property with Chubb, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, within the past week, Chubb notified Defendants that it could not accept real property as collateral. Though disappointing, this decision was not surprising given that Chubb was the only surety willing to even consider accepting real estate as collateral.

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Gary Giulietti, an executive at the Lockton Companies, “the largest privately held insurance brokerage firm in the world,” confirmed that no one wants to accept real estate as collateral.

“As a result, for a company such as The Trump Organization, which has most of its assets invested in real estate, obtaining a bond for $464 million is a practical impossibility,” he wrote.

“Given these exceptional circumstances, Defendants respectfully request that the Court exercise its discretion and relieve Defendants of their obligation to secure an appeal bond in the full amount of the Judgment,” Garten argues, noting that ret. Judge Barbara Jones remains as monitor, and so Trump can’t easily remove his assets from the court’s jurisdiction pending appeal.

In his failed emergency motion to stay the judgment, Trump already offered to front $100 million.

“Together with a reduced bond, the Attorney General thus has more than enough certainty that the status quo will be maintained during the pendency of the appeal and that any judgment affirmed would be satisfied,” Garten wheedled.

Obviously Trump’s plea is entitled to exactly the level of mercy and deference given to every other poor and indigent defendant in the State of New York.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

Topics

Arthur Engoron, Courts, Donald Trump, Government