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Donald Trump posted a $175 million bond to prevent New York’s attorney general from collecting a nearly half-billion-dollar fraud judgment against him and his businesses, temporarily ending a standoff that could have lead to the confiscation of parts of the property of the former president empire taken.
The bond, which Trump had to post to stay execution of the sentence while he appeals it, was underwritten by Knight Insurance Group in California, according to a filing Monday in a Manhattan court.
The amount he was forced to pay was reduced from the full amount – which Trump had said would be an “impossible” sum to secure – to $175 million by an appeals court last week.
The posting of bail came as a gag order against Trump, imposed last week by the judge overseeing a separate criminal case that was due to go to trial later this month, was expanded by another court in New York, after the former president criticized the judge’s daughter on social media.
Trump spent the Easter holidays posting various insults on social media against Judge Juan Merchan and his family, naming his daughter and calling it a scandal on the grounds that she worked at a political consulting firm that counts prominent Democrats among its clients. .
One post linked to a story containing a photo of Merchan’s daughter and another to a social media account that Trump claimed belonged to her — a claim denied by a spokesperson for the New York courts.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the “silence” case against Trump, wrote to the judge arguing that the former president’s “dangerous, violent and reprehensible rhetoric fundamentally threatens the integrity of the country.” [the upcoming trial] and is intended to intimidate both witnesses and participants in the trial.”
The office’s lawyers asked that Trump be explicitly prohibited from talking about the judge’s family. But Trump’s lawyer said that would limit his “constitutionally protected speech.”
Late Monday, Merchan granted the district attorney’s motion, saying that while he was “concerned about a defendant’s First Amendment rights, especially when the defendant is a public figure,” the threat to the integrity of the case was “very real ” .
“Warnings are not sufficient, nor is the use of self-control. The average observer must now, after listening to the recent attacks of the accused, draw the conclusion that if he becomes involved in these proceedings, even marginally, he should worry not only for himself, but also for his loved ones,” he wrote Merchan.
Trump’s posts on his Truth Social Network mentioning Merchan’s daughter appeared to have been deleted after the revised gag order was issued.
The hush case, in which Trump is accused of buying the hush money of a porn star who said she was having an affair with him in the run-up to the 2016 election, and then disguising those payments in business records, is expected to go to trial in Manhattan on April 15. Trump will have to attend the trial in person four days a week.
It is one of four criminal cases that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, is facing, as well as several civil suits in US courts. Last month he posted a $91.6 million bond while appealing an $83.3 million civil judgment for defamation by writer E Jean Carroll.