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Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media after voting at a polling station setup in the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center on March 19, in Palm Beach, Florida.
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers pushed back Thursday on several of the suggestions the New York attorney general’s office made about how he can pay bond.
That includes the idea that Trump could get several underwriters to secure bonds totaling the judgment – saying it would still require Trump to post half a billion dollars in cash or stock – money he doesn’t have.
The court filing comes as Trump now has four days to satisfy the judgment or sway an appeals court to allow him to post a smaller amount or defer posting the payment until after the appeal.
Trump’s legal team argued in the filing that the New York attorney general’s office shouldn’t be able to challenge their claims.
If no arrangement is met, New York Attorney General Letitia James has said she will take steps to seize assets.
The attorney general’s office on Wednesday said that it’s common for large companies to post billion-dollar bonds and suggested Trump should have posted real estate with the court.
“The suggestion is both impractical and unjust. The Attorney General cites no New York case law to support this contention. In any event, from the perspective of risk, the Attorney General’s proposal of a ‘court-appointed officer’ to ‘hold real estate’ is functionally equivalent to what Supreme Court has already imposed through the requirement of a court-appointed monitor to oversee Defendants’ business operations,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Trump’s lawyers also said to be forced to sell properties at a fire sale would cause irreparable injury because they could not later recover the property if they were to win an aspect of the appeal.
“By demanding an undertaking in the full amount of the judgment in order to appeal, the Attorney General and Supreme Court have sought to impose a patently unreasonable, unjust, and unconstitutional (under both the Federal and New York State Constitutions) bond condition,” they wrote.
