The mad queen is up, and he’s asking you to believe ALMOST FIVE HUNDRED MILLION impossible things before breakfast.
Donald Trump, who promised to self-fund his last two campaigns but didn’t, says that he has plenty of cash to pay the bond on the civil fraud judgment.
Sure, attorney Cliff Robert, who technically represents the Trump boys, and Trump Org lawyer Alan Garten just submitted affidavits saying that they can’t get a bond because their clients’ assets are all in real estate, and no surety company will touch commercial property. And, okay, if you want to get technical, the SHOCKING NUMBER is the sum of (1) the difference between the interest Trump would have paid if he’d told the truth on his loan applications and the lower rate he got by lying, and (2) the proceeds of two completed sales on deals obtained using fraud. Also, in the technical vein, the CRAZY INTEREST DEMAND is 9 percent under New York statute, and not set by Justice Arthur Engoron.
But no matter! Donald Trump, who shunted $230,000 in legal fees per day in February to his Save America PAC, has the cash — he’d just rather have his assets seized by the state and liquidated in a forced sale than turn it over.
Or maybe he’s full of shit. But retired Judge Barbara Jones is not full of shit. In an order from Justice Engoron, the ubiquitous court-appointed monitor got stepped-up duties yesterday “to effectuate a productive and enhanced monitorship.” While previously the parties had to get permission to move assets totaling $5 million or more, the monitor will now have much broader authority to do whatever she deems necessary to keep the company from returning to its fraud-y ways. And she’ll be exercising that authority in coordination with an Independent Director of Compliance to be named imminently.
This is probably not what Trump had in mind when he suggested Jones, although he has lately soured on her, accusing her of nitpicking the company’s books to justify her own “exorbitant fees.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Letitia James does not appear to believe the former president has easily seizable cash. As the Daily Beast’s Jose Pagliery reports, the AG has registered judgments against the Trump parties in Westchester County, where the family owns an estate known as Seven Springs. According t0 the original complaint, the Trump Organization spent 20 years trying to subdivide the 213-acre parcel for development, but gave up in 2016 and donated the undeveloped portion for a conservation easement. As is his wont, Trump appears to have told one or two fibs about Seven Springs.
Trump boasted that it was worth $291 million in 2012 when he was trying to buy the Buffalo Bills. But in 2015, Cushman Wakefield appraised it at $56 million, including in the basis a potential for future development which did not exist, as two decades of tangling with local authorities had conclusively demonstrated. Nevertheless, Trump took a $21 million write-off for the conservation easement on the undeveloped portion of the parcel, even at a time when the tax assessor valued the entire plot, including the mansion, at $19 million.
All of which is to say that seizing Seven Springs is probably the beginning, rather than the end, of the AG’s collection efforts, since she’s entitled to somewhere north of $450 million, and selling a beautiful mansion next to a conservation easement isn’t going to get her there. Good thing Trump’s got that giant pile of cash just sitting there, huh?
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.