He can't get a bond. Let's give him the nuclear codes!
What happened to the $400 million in cash Donald Trump said he had lying around?
Donald Trump is appealing the New York civil fraud judgment against him, which makes this the only context in which you can use the words “appealing” and “Trump” in the same sentence.
But he has a problem: if and until the $355 million damage award - actually $450 million, including interest - is overturned, Trump is required to pay the money to the state, which would hold it in escrow pending the outcome of the appeals process.
Donald Trump, the alleged billionaire, does not have the cash on hand. And, to be fair, that’s not really surprising. As much as we tend to believe the super-rich have Scrooge McDuck money bins in which they store their cash, most of their net worth is tied up in assets like real estate.
These assets can be sold, of course, but that takes time. Even actual billionaires might struggle to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in cash on short notice.
The good news for Trump is that there are companies which can post a bond with the state, effectively vouching for him. If the appeals are unsuccessful and Trump takes off, the bond holder would be on the hook for all that money.
The bad news…well, if you’ve even a passing familiarity with Donald Trump’s long history of stiffing creditors and repeatedly filing for bankruptcy, you probably know where this is going:
Two weeks ago, a New York judge ordered Donald Trump to pay a huge penalty of $355 million plus interest — a grand total of more than $450 million — after finding him liable for fraudulently inflating his wealth.
But now that it’s time to produce such an amount, Trump’s legal team is undercutting both his and their own claims about his ability to do so.
In a filing Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers asked for a delay and offered to post a bond of just $100 million rather than the full amount. They called the full amount a “facially absurd” judgment and added that its terms preventing him from obtaining loans “make it impossible to secure and post a complete bond.”
Posting cash or a bond in the full amount is required within 30 days of a judgment to avoid the penalties being enforced while Trump appeals, experts have told The Washington Post.
An appeals judge ruled later Wednesday that Trump will still need to post the full amount but that he can obtain loans; an appeals panel is expected to review the case and issue its own decision March 18.
Before that, Trump’s team also said posting the full amount would “likely” require selling property in ways that would irreparably damage him financially.
And, of course, no Trump legal story would be complete without The Donald making his lawyers look ridiculous, not that Ms. Habba needs any assistance in that department:
Trump lawyer Christopher Kise added during a hearing Wednesday, “No one, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Donald Trump, has 500 million laying around.” (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
But in the very same legal proceedings less than a year ago, Trump indicated he had something close to that amount of cash at his disposal.
In an April 2023 deposition, Trump volunteered that he had “substantially in excess of 400 million in cash.”
“Developers usually don’t have cash. They have assets, not cash,” Trump said. “We have, I believe, 400 plus and going up very substantially every month.”
Trump added later that, despite the legal fees he was facing, “I have over 400 — fairly substantially over $400 million in cash. That’s just cash. That’s just cash.”
[…]
The Trump legal team’s claims are also at odds with what one of its own members said last week, after the judgment.
Appearing on Fox News, Trump lawyer Alina Habba noted that a bond including the full amount would have to be posted and added that “we will be prepared to do that.”
“Unfortunately, they picked the wrong guy to pick on, in my opinion, because he’s strong, he’s resilient, and he happens to have a lot of cash,” Habba added.
In an appearance on Newsmax, Habba was a little less convincing on that front. Asked if Trump had “that kind of money,” Habba interjected, “Yes.” But when the host finished the question with the clause “sitting around,” Habba offered a more equivocal answer.
“I mean he does — of course he has money,” Habba said. “I mean, he’s a billionaire.”
Let’s see if she feels the same way when she tries to collect her substantial legal fees.
Contrary to what experts at X College of Law (formerly Twitter Law School) would have you believe, Trump can appeal the case without posting a bond or paying the full amount.
The problem is, the state would then be able to seize his assets to satisfy the judgment. And it’s at this point that I was going to joke about Trump Tower becoming a Spirit Halloween store, but of course Reddit beat me to it.
There are two likely reasons Trump couldn’t get a bond for the full amount:
Everyone knows he doesn’t have the money, even if he sold everything he owned; and,
Everyone knows he won’t pay it back even if he did have it.
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