A CNN panel on Monday broke down an appeals court’s decision to drastically reduce former President Donald Trump’s bond.
The court agreed to block collection of the judgement in Trump’s civil fraud case, which was set at $454 million, should he be able to post $175 million within 10 days. Trump asserted on Monday that he will post the reduced bond, not yet specifying what method he will use to do so. (RELATED: New York AG Letitia James Takes First Step Toward Seizing Trump’s Assets)
“[This is] an enormous win because the fact that he would not have to pay the huge sum of nearly $500 million, which he couldn’t pay, which we were waiting essentially to see what’s going to happen,” CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes said. “We had absolutely no word from Trump’s attorneys whether or not he could post the bond.”
Sureties typically do not underwrite bonds of over $100 million, Trump’s attorneys asserted in a March court filing. The former president’s lawyers further claimed Trump was unable to post the bond because bond insurance companies strongly prefer cash to real estate.
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“The other thing to point out here, when they approached those 30 or so underwriters, one of the big complaints that they were essentially having was that underwriters don‘t usually go for this amount of nearly half a billion dollars,” Holmes said. “They were saying that the underwriters we’re saying, ‘okay, we’ll do 100 million. That’s kind of our cap.'”
“Now there’s a little bit of wiggle room, right? $175 million is still an enormous amount of money. A lot closer to what they were willing to do in the first place than that $464-$500 million mark,” she added. “So now they have, they can go back to some of these places and see, ‘would you be willing to do this?’ Also, he has the 10 days to figure out, does he have any of the assets he can add to this.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James on Wednesday argued Trump had not supplied evidence that he would be unable to pay and suggested he obtain bonds from multiple sureties.
“He was facing the possibility that he would not be able to post this bond and then the attorney general would be seizing his assets,” CNN legal correspondent Paula Reid said. “His identity for so long has been as a successful billionaire businessman, his name adorns buildings in this city and around the world. And we had talked about earlier the fact that he had appealed. We didn’t expect to get a decision today, but here, I mean, this is a huge relief for him and it does make it possible, though not certain, that he might be able to post this bond, seeing that they’ve made it less than half and given him 10 days to figure out how to potentially come up with this money. So this is a huge relief for Trump.”
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