Eric Trump has voiced his concerns about the $454 million bond that his father, former President Donald Trump, is required to pay in his New York fraud case, labeling it as a “political vendetta.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the case against President Trump, has given him until March 25 to pay the bond, which he must submit before he can appeal the judgment against him.
The former president would risk having his assets seized by the state Attorney General’s Office if he fails to pay the bond.
However, Eric Trump, the executive vice president of The Trump Organization and a co-defendant in the fraud case, said the nearly half-billion-dollar bond is “simply not commercially available.”
“Letitia James is hellbent on a political vendetta against my father with zero regard for the lives of thousands of hard-working New Yorkers, who make their living in our buildings,” he added.
“I went after the largest sureties in the world, the largest sureties in the country. They said, Eric, the last time we have seen a bond of that size is when we did the Big Dig in Boston, which was a $25 billion construction project that lasted almost 25 years,” he told the news outlet.
Disclaimer From Auditors
When asked about whether the former president had auditors to assess the valuations of his assets, Eric Trump responded affirmatively.“Yes. And you had a disclaimer that’s three pages long saying, ‘These are our values. We believe Mar-a-Lago’s worth this.’ And, by the way, the values were very low,” he stated.
Eric Trump characterized the case as “lawfare” designed to divert resources away from his father’s presidential campaign and accused the New York attorney general of trying to bankrupt the former president.
“They’re trying to deprive him of his cash,” he said. “They want to hurt him so badly. And it’s going to backfire, because he’s going to win this in November, and everybody in this country universally knows exactly what these people are doing.”
Despite the massive bond, Eric Trump stated that President Trump intended to inject “hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign.”
The total judgment was $363 million, with approximately $355 million of that amount specifically applicable to President Trump. An additional $4 million is to be recovered from Eric Trump, $4 million from Donald Trump Jr., and $1 million from Allen Weisselberg, the former finance chief of The Trump Organization.
In recent court filings, Trump attorneys and brokers argued for a second time to the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court that a $464 million bond was “impossible” to secure, and requested to post a $100 million bond to stay judgment during the appeal.
State law requires that money be put up via bond or deposited as cash into an escrow account to stay the execution of judgment, ensuring that it can be collected if an appeal fails or is withdrawn. In this case, the execution of judgment would have included the attorney general seizing Trump buildings, as she told reporters after the verdict.
