New York AG urges appeals court to make Trump pay full bond

The New York attorney general's office urged a state appeals court to make former President Trump put up a full bond before pausing the multimillion-dollar judgment in his civil fraud case.

The state's filing follows claims by Trump's legal team Monday that the former president is unable to secure the full bond due, despite his "diligent efforts." An insurance broker who testified for Trump during the fraud trial last year called the effort a "practical impossibility" in a sworn affidavit attached to the filing.

"Defendants' new factual allegations and legal arguments fail to support their extraordinary request for a stay based on a bond or deposit of less than one-fourth of the money-judgment amount," Dennis Fan, senior assistant solicitor general in the attorney general's office, said in a Wednesday court filing.

Trump alone was ordered to pay a $454 million judgment after a New York judge determined he conspired to inflate his assets for tax and insurance benefits and was liable for fraud, after the state sued Trump in 2022 over deceitful business practices. With interest piling on an additional $112,000 each day Trump doesn't pay, the former president owes the state about $457 million as of Wednesday.

Obtaining a bond would automatically pause the judgment's enforcement while he appeals, but to do so, Trump must post collateral covering 120 percent of the judgment — more than $557 million, his lawyers said in the court filing.

Instead, Trump has asked the court to accept a bond of $100 million.

"Very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude," Trump's lawyers wrote.

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump leaves after voting in the Florida primary election in Palm Beach, Fla., Tuesday, March 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

But the attorney general's office asserted that's not true.

Fan argued that there is no rule limiting Trump to a single bond from a single surety for the full judgment amount and said that the former president could divide the multimillion-dollar bond across multiple sureties to limit "any individual surety's risk."

He told the court that the insurance broker cited in Trump's motion, Gary Giulietti, was found to lack credibility by Judge Arthur Engoron, who oversaw the fraud trial, due to an "ongoing personal and professional relationship with Donald Trump."

The state lawyer also pushed back against Trump's assertion his many properties can't be put up as collateral, contending that the use of real estate as collateral is "hardly impossible."

"Defendants' allegations thus boil down to the proposition that sureties have been unwilling to accept Mr. Trump's real-estate holdings as collateral in this case," Fan wrote. "Yet defendants supply no documentary evidence that demonstrates precisely what real property they offered to sureties, on what terms that property was offered, or precisely why the sureties were unwilling to accept the assets.

"As far as the Court can infer, sureties may have refused to accept defendants' specific holdings as collateral because using Mr. Trump's real estate will generally need 'a property appraisal' and his holdings are not nearly as valuable as defendants claim," he continued.

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Trump's deadline to post bond is Monday — the same day his first criminal trial was scheduled to begin in Manhattan before a last-minute document dump delayed the proceeding.

If he can't come up with the cash, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) can begin to enforce Engoron's judgment by starting to seize Trump's assets, which could include some of his most famous Manhattan properties, such as Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street.