A New York Appeals Court reportedly could rule anytime this week on former President Donald Trump’s appeal to hold off posting a $454 million bond or have it reduced.
Trump must post a liquid (cash, securities) bond on Monday to cover a civil fraud judgment, but 30 surety companies told him they would not accept real estate assets as collateral, his lawyers said last week.
If Trump is unable to post bond, New York Attorney General Letitia James intends to enforce the judgment. “We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers,” James told ABC News in February.
James might be in a position to collect the grand sum by three methods, USA Today reported:
- Placing liens against properties
- Collecting rents from properties
- Collecting funds from Trump’s New York state bank accounts
Trump attorney Clifford Robert asked the court to intervene before Monday’s deadline, arguing James’ potential actions are “illogical,” “unconstitutional,” “impractical,” and “unjust.”
The court could rule on Trump’s request at any moment. “The appeals court generally issues rulings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there is very little chance it will act by Monday on Trump’s request to waive the bond requirement,” the Washington Post reported Monday. “If it doesn’t, and if Trump doesn’t post a bond by then, legal experts say there is nothing preventing James from calling on the New York City sheriffs or on city marshals to begin seizing his assets.”
James could find it prudent to wait to take action against Trump if the bond is not posted by Monday’s deadline. “Legal experts say Trump has a chance of getting some type of relief from the appeals court. If James begins moving on his assets before the court rules, she may have to backtrack afterward. She also may consider the optics of moving quickly,” the Post reported. “As Nikos Passas, a Northeastern University criminology professor, put it: ‘She doesn’t want to be accused of being overly aggressive and unfair.'”
If James takes action, she risks actually benefiting Trump politically, pollster Frank Luntz warned over the weekend. “You’re going to create the greatest victimhood of 2024, and you’re going to elect Donald Trump,” Luntz told CNN.
“If they take his stuff, he’s going to say that this is proof that the federal government and the establishment and the swamp in Washington and all the politicians across the country and the attorneys generals [sic] and all of this, that this is a conspiracy to deny him the presidency,” Luntz added. “He’s going to go up in the polls, just like he went up every single time they indicted him.
He continued:
It will prove the things he is saying on the campaign trail and he will go up [in the polls] and it may just elect him president, do not forget that and I say this to the attorney general right now, if you play politics on this — this is what the secretaries of state did in Colorado and what they did in, I believe, is [sic] Maine.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley believes Trump’s predicament is a form of “mob justice” that could ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court:
His position is in order to get any other judge to look at what I’ve done to you, you’ve got to come up with basically a half a billion dollars just to appeal. It’s like a judge saying, “I’m going to take your house away, but you can appeal my decision. You just have to sell your house in order to do it.” …[M]any people look at this as a type of almost mob justice.
“It shocks the conscience that you have to pony up this type of money just to get someone to look at what you believe, and I believe, is an excessive ruling by this judge,” Turley said.
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Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.