New York Attorney General Letitia James has taken initial steps in New York’s Westchester County to prepare to seize former President Donald Trump’s properties after a state judge ordered him to pay a $455 million fine in a civil fraud case.
Several judgments were entered by Ms. James, a Democrat, with the Westchester County Clerk’s Office against the former president and his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, on March 6. The three judgments filed in the county by the attorney general against President Trump amounted to $243,326,767.10, $20,421,141.98, and $63,580,273.97.
In Westchester County, located just north of New York City, the former president’s company owns the Seven Springs estate and the Trump National Golf Course Westchester.
The judgments came about a week after Judge Arthur Engoron fined the former president, his two sons, and other Trump Organization officials, claiming they defrauded banks and insurance companies by inflating their properties’ values.
The former U.S. president faces a Monday deadline to post a bond covering a $454 million civil judgment against him for overstating his net worth and the value of his real estate properties to dupe investors and lenders, or risk state authorities seizing his assets while he appeals.
The registrations do not necessarily mean that seizures of the Westchester properties are imminent. But they are a procedural step that would be necessary should Ms. James seek to seize them in the future. The attorney general said in February that she would be prepared to seize the former president’s properties if he cannot pay the civil fraud debt.
Neither Ms. James nor the former president’s lawyers have publicly commented on the judgments entered in Westchester County, which were first reported by multiple news outlets such as Reuters and Bloomberg on Wednesday.
Before a three-month, non-jury trial in Manhattan, Justice Engoron found that President Trump had engaged in fraud by overvaluing properties including Seven Springs, as well as better-known properties such as his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his penthouse apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower. The judge wrote that he believed President Trump fraudulently inflated the value of Seven Springs by more than 400 percent in 2014.
‘Fire Sale’
Earlier this week, President Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that he might be forced to sell his properties and assets at “fire sale prices” to post bond in the case or to appeal the judgment.“Judge Engoron actually wants me to put up Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for the Right to Appeal his ridiculous decision. In other words, he is trying to take my Appellate Rights away from me,” President Trump wrote Tuesday. “Nobody has ever heard of anything like this before.”
The former president warned that he would be “forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense?”
His attorneys on Thursday echoed some of those claims in court, saying that being forced to sell properties at far lower prices would cause irreparable injury because they wouldn’t be able to later recover them if they were to win 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,” his attorneys said in the filing.
Previously, his lawyers had written that he would appeal Judge Engoron’s ruling, but he must put up the bond amount to move forward. They submitted an affidavit from an insurance broker this month saying it would be a “practical impossibility” to secure the amount for the appeal before the March 25 deadline.
“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” the former president’s attorneys wrote.
Meanwhile, the former president has to deal with balancing raising money for both his campaign and his legal expenses, which are likely to rise as he faces four upcoming criminal trials. He has pleaded not guilty in the criminal cases and has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases.
In a separate civil case, President Trump was able to post bond in the $83.3 million defamation judgment issued in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll. A jury separately had ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $5 million after she claimed he assaulted her back in the 1990s.
