Donald Trump was already recovering from multiple legal setbacks last week when a New York judge handed the former president a stunning defeat in his civil fraud case, ordering him to pay nearly $450 million to the state after finding he was accused of conspiring to manipulate his net worth. .
Judge Arthur Engoron’s decision capped a bad legal week for Trump, who watched his lawyers try to access sealed files in his classified documents case in Florida and then lose his attempts to postpone his first criminal trial in New York. .
There may be worse to come.
The immediate priority on Trump’s legal agenda is figuring out how to come up with $450 million, including prejudgment interest, or finding a company ready to help him post bail within 30 days, according to people familiar with the matter. so that he can appeal the sentence when the court makes the decision.
Trump saw the decision as a two-pronged stab at his personal identity: His cash accounts are likely to be all but depleted, and he is hampered by three years of running the Trump Organization, the vehicle he used to achieve his fame.
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Trump’s choice was to avoid using his own money during the appeal, and his lawyers contacted several companies to provide bail; This essentially reassures the state that it has the money to pay the judgment if Trump loses the case.
In order to buy the bonds, Trump will first have to find a company that will accept him. He would then have to pay a premium to the bonding company and offer collateral, presumably in the form of his most valuable asset, from which interest and fees would accrue.
If the sentence is upheld on appeal, Trump will face a huge financial burden. In a sworn interview with the New York attorney general’s office last year, Trump said he had $400 million in cash and cash equivalents, but that figure could not be verified.
Some of that figure comes from two property sales after Trump left the White House and new ventures, including a real estate branding deal in Oman.
The deals were intended to provide Trump with cash support in the event of a sudden financial setback. But even if Trump’s $400 million claim is true, that claim will clearly fall apart if the $450 million penalty is largely approved.
Adding to the total amount Trump must forego is an $83.3 million judgment against him last month after he lost a second defamation lawsuit involving author E Jean Carroll. This is not a figure to be paid immediately, but it is another big number to take into account.
Trump may eventually find himself without sufficient support and face the need to mortgage or sell some of his properties. Although Trump is not expected to go bankrupt (his total assets run into the billions of dollars), it would be a particularly humiliating moment for the former president.
The legal troubles go beyond causing him financial pain. On Thursday, it was confirmed that Trump will stand trial in New York on charges that he falsified business records over secret payments to a porn star to protect himself from bad press ahead of the 2016 election.
Despite last-ditch attempts by Trump’s lawyers to postpone the trial, jury selection in the case is scheduled for March 25.
Before the hearing to confirm the trial date, people involved in the situation said they retained some hope that Trump’s advisers might be delayed, even if they believed it was the most politically advantageous trial of the four impeachments against him.
If Trump had to face a criminal trial before the November election, they would choose the hush money case because even if Trump is convicted, he may not face prison time; This could lead to voters becoming desensitized to the other, and could lead to federal criminal charges.
But Trump may have to grapple with the fallout from another legal setback in Atlanta after he and his co-defendants, charged by the Fulton district attorney for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, fought to argue that Trump should be disqualified from filing the case.
It’s the second day of an evidentiary hearing examining whether Fani Willis’s romantic relationship with her top aide, Nathan Wade, amounted to some kind of kickback scheme sufficient to create a conflict of interest that went awry for the defendants.
In an attempt to contradict Willis and Wade’s testimony, the defendants called Wade’s former divorce attorney, Terrence Bradley, to testify that the relationship began before Willis hired Wade to work on the Trump case on November 1, 2021. The goal was to have Bradley contradict the affidavits of Willis and Wade, thus proving that they had committed perjury and allowing Fulton County Chief Judge Scott McAfee to discredit their testimony.
However, Bradley was a particularly reluctant witness and testified that he had privileged knowledge of when the relationship began but not personal knowledge obtained separately from her representing Wade.
At the end of the day, it seemed unclear whether the defendants had met their burden of proof to remove Willis and dismiss the charges in Georgia.