Former US President Donald Trump speaks to the media after voting at a polling station set up in the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center on March 19, 2024, in Palm Beach, Florida.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Donald Trump is at serious risk that New York’s attorney general will begin trying to collect a $454 million civil business fraud judgment against him on Monday unless an appeals court grants the former president a reprieve last minute.
Trump’s son Eric, a co-defendant in the fraud case, accused Attorney General Letitia James on Sunday of trying to bankrupt his father with the ruling.
Donald Trump’s lawyers have said he is unable to post an appeal bond that would prevent the AG from collecting the judgment as he tries to overturn the fraud verdict – and James told an appeals court last week which should reject his request to suspend the ruling from coming into force.
“They’re trying to deprive him of his money, they want to bankrupt him, they want to hurt him so badly,” Eric Trump told Fox News in an interview.
“And it’s going to backfire, because he’s going to win in November, and everyone in this country knows exactly what these people are doing,” Eric said.
Eric also said, “No one has ever seen a bond of this size.”
“Every single person when I went to them said ‘Hey, can I have a half a billion dollar bond?’ … [T]hey, we were laughing. They were laughing,” Eric said.
Eric’s complaint came days after news broke that James’ office had registered the massive fraud judgment with the county clerk’s office in Westchester County, New York. Registration is necessary if James intends to seize Trump’s golf course and Seven Springs estate in that county to partially satisfy the judgment.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Eric, and his other adult son, Donald Trump Jr., were found responsible for fraud at the Trump Organization along with two company executives after a trial in Manhattan Supreme Court . James’ office was the plaintiff in the case.
Last month, Judge Arthur Engoron found that the defendants had fraudulently inflated the reported value of Trump’s assets to boost his purported net worth and obtain more favorable loan terms for Trump Organization properties. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have run their father’s company since he was elected president in 2016.
The elder Trump is responsible for most of the $464 million in disgorgement and interest that Engoron ordered in compensatory damages in the case. However, Trump’s children were each ordered to pay $4 million.
Donald Trump last week asked a mid-level appeals court to stay the sentence, with his lawyers saying it proved “impossible” for him to get an appeal bail.
Such a bond would ensure that the state would receive the judgment if Trump lost his appeal of the case and was otherwise unable to satisfy it.
Trump’s lawyers said the surety companies wanted him to have more than $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents before they would consider taking out an appeal bond in this case.
The lawyers said in a court filing that the more than 30 companies he approached for bail refused to accept real estate as collateral.
If the appeals court does not grant Trump a temporary exemption from the ruling, he could ask the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to grant it. However, it is unclear whether Trump would be very successful at that level.
Monday is the first day James can begin the process of seizing Trump’s properties to satisfy the ruling without a court order preventing her from doing so.
Losers in New York civil cases must routinely post an appeal bond or be liable for the judgments against them when they appeal a verdict.