Trump has until Monday to come up with the money.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has urged an appeals court to ignore Donald Trump’s latest effort to worm his way out of paying the $464 million disgorgement from his bank fraud trial.
On Wednesday, an attorney for James told the court that Trump’s claims could not be trusted since they were based on sworn statements by Alan Garten, general counsel at the Trump Organization, and Gary Giulietti, one of Trump’s close friends. There’s a precedent to disqualify them—during the trial, Judge Arthur Engoron decided that Giulietti could not be considered a credible witness and argued that Garten had “professional interests in this litigation.”
Garten, however, snapped back at that. “The court found no such thing. The AG statement is reckless and completely untrue,” Garten said in response to the filing, according to The Washington Post.
So far, Trump has tried and failed to pause the rapidly growing interest on the judgment, counteroffering the court a $100 million bond in lieu of the full amount. He has also approached several brokers and 30 suretors for help securing a bond, though it didn’t seem to work out for him, according to a filing by Trump’s attorneys, who admitted that suretors refused to accept Trump’s real estate as collateral. Instead, they would only accept cash to the tune of $1 billion, which Trump said he and his businesses just don’t have.
Trump is, was, and has always been, a conman. It’s his bread and butter. It was critical to the facade of “highly successful businessman” that he put up that he appear ridiculously wealthy. Not just wealthy, but ultra wealthy. While he has always had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, and owned many properties that when combined would total over a billion dollars in value, he has never at any point in his life had access to the kind of wealth that the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates have. Even worse for him, he’s actually an incredibly bad businessman, nearly every venture Trump has directly been involved in (rather than just licensing his name for someone actually competent to use) has failed utterly.
In an effort to shore up his image Trump has for decades inflated the value of all his properties, and then used those inflated values to take out loans and mortgages that he then blows on bad business decisions. There’s a very real chance that he might actually be telling the truth for the first time in his life and he can’t actually scrape together the nearly $500 million even if he sold every piece of property he owns. He may have already over leveraged it all so badly that there’s just not $100 million of value left to squeeze out of it.
Of course it’s also possible he actually could come up with the money but doing so would require him to liquidate every property he owns and would also expose just how badly he has managed the wealth left to him by his father. Something he desperately wants to avoid lest it utterly shatter his “successful businessman” facade forever (not to mention legitimately bankrupt him for once in his life).
Either way it’s about time a lifetime of fraud and lies caught up to him.