Eric Trump has come out railing against the $454m fraudulent property valuations judgment against his father Donald Trump, saying bonds the size of the half-a-billion dollar one the former president is being required to put up “don’t exist in this country”.
As a court-imposed deadline ticks down on the former president’s family and their businesses to come up with almost half-a-billion dollars, the 40-year-old executive vice-president of the Trump Organization told Fox News on Sunday that bond issuers laughed when he approached them for that sum.
“No one’s ever seen a bond this size,” Eric Trump said. “Every single person, when I came to them saying, ‘Hey, can I get a half-billion-dollar bond?’ They were laughing. Top executives of large insurance companies had never seen anything of this size.”
He told host Maria Bartiromo: “A $10m bond is a large bond. A $15m bond is an enormous bond. A half-a-billion dollar bond?”
On Friday, Donald Trump said he has nearly $500m in cash and suggested he could afford bond in the New York case, which resulted in the former president, his company and some of its executives all being found liable for fraudulent business practices. But that contradicted Trump’s lawyers who have said a surety that would protect Trump’s assets from seizure while he appeals the judgement was “impossible” to obtain.
As soon as Tuesday morning, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, could begin to seize Trump’s assets, including his bank accounts and property. Eric Trump, who was fined close to $4m by Judge Arthur Engoron in the same case, was asked how he thought the court had arrived at the fine.
“You know what it was, it was a crooked number,” Eric Trump said. “They’re trying to put my father out of business or trying to take all his resources that you’d otherwise put into his own campaign for presidency.”
And he claimed that voters would see through the effort and return him to the White House at Joe Biden’s expense in November.
“It’s going to backfire because he’s going to win this,” Eric Trump said to the Republican-friendly network. “And everybody in this country universally knows exactly what these people are doing.”
Business executives, including Shark Tank host and investor Kevin O’Leary, have also questioned the massive judgment and the now-expiring, 30-day deadline to meet it.
“Property rights are mentioned 37 times in the Constitution. Due process – very important,” O’Leary told Fox last week. “Why steal someone’s assets in 27 days? Why not give them more time to come up with the cash – forget about Donald Trump, who would want this to happen to them?”
O’Leary said his criticism at the decision had nothing to do with Trump, but with the dissolution of the “essence of the American brand”.
From the other side of the New York political spectrum, progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said there was a risk if James decided not to move on Trump’s assets.
“It’s ultimately up to her determination, but it is my belief that all people should be treated equally under the law,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s State of the Union. “I actually think that there is risk in not seizing these assets and the open window that exists in him trying to secure these funds through other means.
“I think that what we are dealing with politically is the much larger and much more grave and serious pressure of having this judgment against Donald Trump, and him being in this degree of debt and the financial pressures that he is under, and what he is subject to do in order to obtain those assets.”
She added: “There is a very real risk of political corruption.”
Separately, Trump is grappling with more than 80 pending criminal charges across various jurisdictions in connection with efforts to forcibly overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments.
He is also facing multimillion-dollar penalties handed to him after losing a lawsuit centering on a rape allegation that was deemed to be substantially true.
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