New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office on March 20 asked the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court to throw out several arguments made by former President Donald Trump as he seeks to stay enforcement of more than $350 million in penalties while he appeals.
“The Court should not consider defendants’ new allegations and arguments—which contend that a full bond or deposit is a ‘practical impossibility,’” the letter to the court reads.
In order to appeal the $350 million judgment and hold off the attorney general from seizing assets in the meantime, President Trump would be required to post bond upward of $464 million, requiring what one broker estimated to be $1 billion in cash.
Trump attorneys told the court that four separate brokers had been in talks with more than 30 surety companies since before the final judgment was handed down, and none would issue a $464 million bond.
Gary Giulietti, an executive with the largest privately held insurance brokerage firm in the world, submitted a sworn affidavit saying he had never seen a bond of this size for a private individual or company and that surety companies don’t fill bonds of this size except for the largest public companies in the world in rare instances.
Few companies are federally authorized to issue bonds that large, and most have internal policies limiting single bonds to $100 million, he added.
President Trump’s attorneys had offered to put up a $100 million bond to stay enforcement during the appeal. A state judge will decide whether this will suffice.
The attorney general’s office now argues that the defense should have raised arguments “about the difficulty of obtaining a bond” before the judgment had been entered.
They claim that Mr. Giulietti’s statements are “unreliable,” as he was not an expert witness during the trial. The trial judge had determined Mr. Giulietti to “lack credibility” because he had an “ongoing personal and professional relationship with Donald Trump.”
Mr. Giulietti is an executive at Lockton Companies, which was contracted by the Trump Organization and received more than $1 million in commissions in 2022.
Attorney Alan Garten also submitted statements about the extent of the defense’s efforts to obtain a bond, detailing that only Chubb was willing to consider real estate as collateral as it is not surety companies’ common practice to accept hard assets. That negotiation fell through in the past week.
The attorney general argued that Mr. Garten is also “unreliable,” as he had contributed to “falsifying the reported size of Mr. Trump’s triplex apartment.”
The state attorneys argue that there is no requirement that President Trump obtain only a single bond and that they could obtain several “to a smaller sum, such as $100 or $200 million apiece.”
‘Nothing Unusual’
“There is nothing unusual about even billion-dollar judgments being fully bonded on appeal,” the attorney general argued, pointing to cases against Apple, Sony, Samsung, Carnegie Mellon, and Oracle.
The state attorneys also claimed that the sureties’ not accepting real estate as collateral “is hardly impossible as a general matter.”
“They do not explain why a bank would not accept real property to finance [an irrevocable] letter of credit,” the letter reads.
The state argued that the defense supplied no evidence that these sureties will not accept real estate, “or precisely why the sureties were unwilling to accept the assets.”
Mr. Giulietti had generalized in his explanation that sureties generally are not equipped to handle the management or quick sales of real estate should a claim be made on the bond.
The state suggested that the court could infer that the Trump properties “are not nearly as valuable as defendants claim,” and that this may be why he can’t get a bond.
They fault the defendants for “fail[ing] to propose a serious alternative to fully secure the judgment.”
President Trump had stated in a social media post that to put up the cash required for a bond of this size would demand a “fire sale” of his properties.
State attorneys argue that this is preferable to the state’s taking on the risk of liquidating Trump Organization assets.
“If defendants were truly unable to provide an undertaking, they at a minimum should have consented to have their real-estate interests held by Supreme Court to satisfy the judgment,” or otherwise pledged the assets as security, they argued.
From The Epoch Times
