US legal system continues to baffle me but on the face of it the judgement to reduce the bond amount and extend the due date is nothing but leniency for an apparently very wealthy person.
Would such privilege be given to a person with less wealth?
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I can’t stand Trump and he should be in jail. His whole life he has been ducking and diving. It appalls me that the political process has not disqualified him, and that he runs for the highest office again, with a good chance of winning.
With all that said, my tuppence worth, as a non legal person, is that the bond that was set for him did seem unduly high. The fine is right, given the years of defrauding banks by lying about the value of real estate holdings to gain better interest rates. The fine is right.
He is due an appeal, legally, and all that is playing out.
If the appeal fails, he is liable for the full fine.
The bond is a down payment, of sorts, that delays payment of the full fine while the appeal runs its course. It seems unusual to me that the bond was originally the same amount of the full fine.
The new bond amount is not insignificant, somewhere between a third and half of the fine. If he doesn’t raise it the judgment will start to be enacted and they will come after his assets until the full fine is covered. Rightly so.
There is a sense in which wealthy people always seem to benefit from ‘better’ outcomes in the legal system. In the instance of Trump, ducking and diving with the legal system is probably the one subject in his life that he is an expert on, as his crimes have been egregious but his penalties have so far not been commensurate.
This one will sting him, and he is doing his utmost to avoid it.
For these cases the bond is not arbitrarily set, but is set at a value of the judgement being appealed plus however much interest is accrued by the time it is posted. If you are ok with the judgement, you should be ok with the bond. To that point, I am yet to read an explanation of the reason the appellate court gave for lowering the bond.
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I get the interest part. I didn’t realize the bond was usually in the same amount of the full fine. I thought it was more of a down payment while the appeal played out. Thanks for the info.
If the bond is supposed to be the same as the full fine, and that is legally enshrined, there is no reason for lowering the amount.
I suspect it’s a case of Trump appealing and shopping around until he gets an answer he likes.
Edit
But if the law says the bond must be an amount to cover the full fine, plus interest, then I don’t know why he got it lowered by over $250M.
He is due some time in a hessian sack with some hungry wolverines.
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The purpose of a bond is primarily to protect the interest of the party who won the case. Without it you open the door the guilty party having time to conduct fuckery so that when the bill is finally due they can claim there isn’t any money left to collect on.
As for why the appeal court lowered it, yeah I havent found a reason yet either.
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Same. Absolutely nothing in any article I’ve seen on it.
So I’m still baffled basically.
Frank Luntz had been saying that the worst thing that could happen , from a Democrat pov , was for James to start seizing Trump’s properties. The argument being that it would have resulted in the kind of uptick in his numbers that began with his first indictment. I’ve no idea who the appeal judges were or whether or not that had a bearing on their decision , but fundamentally nothing has changed regarding his chances on appeal , and if Luntz is right then it improves Biden’s chances come November.
Regarding the Manhattan case , if like me you were worried about there being further delays beyond the trial date now set for April 15 , then the legal consensus seems to be that is almost certain to be adhered to. Trump may try to appeal it but there are virtually no grounds to do so. Unlike the other cases it’s a straightforward matter with no underlying legal issues needing to be resolved before it goes to trial.
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How embarrassing would it be for him, if he still couldn’t raise the bond monies, even after they have been reduced… Hard to remember back, to a more tranquil time when this ‘Orange Melt’, was not hogging every headline on a daily basis - It is actually depressing having his face pop up, be it alongside or on the same page, in more or less every news article…
I think there is something else going on here
Remember, for the purpose of the bond, AG James stated in her filing to the appeals court that she was willing to allow Trump to put property on hold with the court rather than having to find cash to “pay” it. So while there is still the debate of what happens were he to lose the appeal and refuse to pay on time, it made the prospect of asset seizure over the bond something that received far more coverage than it merited. For a property magnate like he is, that should have been a relative easy and painless bar to meet.
So why is he complaining about the difficulty of raising the cash when it just was not required that he do so? Something else is clearly going on. Partly its just setting up that portion of the electorate that Lutz is talking about to make them think he’s being hard done by. But I think the bigger goal is to set up yet another election interference claim. We are going back to 2016 where the perception was that as a billionaire self funding his campaign he was immune to being influenced the way other politicians are who have to dance for money (fucking LOL). What he will now claim is that he intended to use his own money to fund this campaign, but Engeron and Kaplan together, 2 “Democrats”, connived to rob the Trump 2024 campaign of 600m plus in campaign funds in an effort to rig the election.
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It looks like the fat fuck just got himself a gag order in the New York case. Unsurprising really after the stuff he was posting this morning on Shite Social.
My guess he’s mortgaged up to his neck . I read somewhere that Trump Tower was remortgaged in 2022. But then there’s areas that should have been in the clear.
I’ve long since thought he hasn’t got a pot to piss in, and it is all smoke and mirrors.
Relatively speaking, as he can rustle up millions here and there, but he is nowhere near as wealthy as he claims, and his wealth is a mirage as it is all robbing Peter to pay Paul.
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Self proclaimed King of Debt by all accounts
Yeah, there was a reported 100m mortgage taken out a couple of years ago against his stake in Trump tower and I’ve seen other reports suggesting up to 500m in mortgages across his entire portfolio. But even of the rest of the portfolio, he owns very little of the buildings he’s associated with. For example, in Trump International it has been reported that all the Trump Org owns is the parking garage, the valet booth and lobby bathrooms 
.
So yeah, he’d almost certainly had to have used a collection of assets to cover the amount if that was his approach and you can understand why that would be damaging to his brand.
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It’s some sort of modern day version of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Apparently his penthouse at Trump Tower is worth more than the rest of the equity he has left in the entire building. The rest of it was long since sold off (to Russian mobsters) to keep him afloat during bankruptcy.
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Why not make Russian mobsters president? Cut out the middle man.
Jeez…where to begin?
$4M revenue, $58M loss.
$40M(!?!) in interest expense in 2023
A non-cash adjustment for almost $76M in the previous year that makes it look like the company is worth something (derivative liabilities?!? for a start-up social media/tech firm?)
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He has taken his real estate approach into Trump media. The numbers are meaningless. It’s not a normal business that you can see the sense, either to invest or at least appreciate what they are trying to do. My best guess is he wanted the PR to drive up the share price, Ala GameStop or something like that, to sell his holding for a massively inflated price to a sucker who will get poor.
The fella is a joke. Biden needs to get stuck in, gloves off, as playing nicely by the usual rules isn’t working. Kick him where it hurts. Talk about what a business failure he is. Broke Don.