Donald Trump was supposed to have to post a $464 million bond by Monday or else the state of New York could begin collecting on the massive civil fraud judgment leveled against him earlier this year. An appeals court bailed him out, blocking collection of the judgment and giving the former president 10 days to post a drastically reduced $175 million bond.
The order is a huge win for Trump, whose assets were going to be subject to seizure if he couldn’t post nearly half-a-billion dollars by Monday. His lawyers said last week he wasn’t going to be able to come up with the money after 30 underwriters rejected him. The New York Times has reported that Trump is expected to be able to scrounge the new, reduced $175 million bond
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME
The legal system is doing EVERYTHING it can to delay literally everything for this man, just so that election time will creep closer and closer and they can just say, “oh it’s too close to election time and we can’t just cancel a Presidential candidate in the midst of all this”.
These exceptions will never be given to any normal citizen of the US, but when it’s this rich orange idiot, every rule in existence will bend.
It’s pretty funny seeing his supporters and himself claim that the whole system is against him and that this is all some unfair witch hunt, and then turn around and see that he is constantly getting special treatment in the news.
That’s how they justify his innocence. When a corrupt system exonerates a corrupt piece of shit, but you they to acknowledge the corruption in either-
It’ll appear as if justice is being carried out and their corrupt piece of shit walks free.
Yep, trump is not the only person on trial here. You can’t set a precedent that actually punishes financial fraud to the point where you can’t actually profit from it when you’re eventually caught.
Trump isn’t the only real estate tycoon in NYC who has been fraudulently inflating the value of their assets. It would be uncomfortable for the judges to have to make a similar decision in the future to campaign donors.
Tbf the law works both ways. They cannot drop the charges to give him favor in the elections either. After the elections however, if he’s the president…
I actually thought something like this was going to happen, since it has happened before, per another comment I read earlier.
Some corporations were told to post billions in appeals bonds, and in the end they were reduced to a fraction of it.
So, while disappointing, I wasn’t completely surprised of this event.
I’m slightly less mad now that I know this has precedent. I’m still fucking furious that the only precedent I’ve heard about is corporations and Trump, since the law should be equally applied regardless of absolute amounts of money and I’m pretty sure that someone living in poverty isn’t going to get the same treatment for a $50k (or whatever is a proportional amount) judgement against them.
You had to have seen it coming.
What was going to happen, he fails to post bond like any other schmuck and goes to jail?
That wasn’t what was at stake here. Trump was already found guilty, he wasn’t bonding out of pretrial detention he was having to post bond in order to appeal the ruling, which typically requires the person making the appeal to post a bind to make sure they don’t spend all their money fighting on appeal, just to lose the appeal and not have any money left to pay the original judgement.
So my expectation was that yes, he would have to follow the same court rules as everyone else and put up the bond in order to appeal. While I do think we should get rid of requiring pretrial detention bond, I don’t necessarily see an issue with requiring pre-appeal bond. I don’t know, you don’t want to create a situation where you’re means testing the right to appeal, but you don’t want people to indefinitely delay enforcement of judgement against them or to allow them to spend away their ability to pay the judgement on appeals. Maybe forcing either the entirety of the judgement to be paid into a more traditional escrow account, or a payment plan for the judgement to be accepted and that paid into escrow, before an appeal can be started?
Any way you cut it though, I can’t fault this chuckle fuck for playing the court game but I’m fucking incensed the court is enabling it.
Thanks for explaining more about the shitty us “justice” system
Oh, okay, cool, so the justice system cares if you say it’s unfair and you can’t afford the judgment now? Because I’m pretty sure that’s news to most people.
We wouldn’t want to ruin his future. He has real potential!
Oh sorry, wrong case.
This sucks, but a few points are at least worth mentioning:
-
Of the five judges listed on the order, annoyingly slim as it is, three are Democrats and two are “nonpartisan” but with resumes in the public sector and public interest law.
-
Most states actually have a cap on appeal bonds, often around $50 million or less. NY doesn’t have one, but all the same thinking, for good or for ill, that would lead to a statutory limit might influence the appeals court here. Among them is precluding additional litigation from forcing a fire sale.
-
In an appeal like this, the court has to at least conceptually imagine that there’s some possibility of success, and that with a defendant who is leveraged AF and not nearly as liquid as he boasts, there is only one bite at the apple when seizing and selling the assets to satisfy the judgment. If the court is convinced that this amount, well into nine figures, will occupy the vast majority of his liquid assets and insure some plausible compensation for the plaintiff, and the other assets aren’t going anywhere, then it’s not insane to demand a bond more in line with the available liquidity.
Trump is definitely getting the “rich business owner with lots of lawyers” treatment here, and that’s certainly something you could criticize about the American legal system, but I don’t think we’re seeing some completely inexplicable abuse of existing civil procedure. The orange turd still gets the due process that a President Turd would deny to so many others.
TL;DR: it’s possible the only thing the Appeals Court is saying is that ol’ Donny really can’t get the bigger bond and that Trump Tower will still be there to seize later.
I heartily disagree on these limits being to prevent a fire sale. They’re to protect the wealthy from a fire sale. You or I would be forced into a fire sale in a heartbeat for a million dollar judgement. And then into debtor’s prison when we turn out to be normal people who don’t have a million dollars of assets lying around.
And this is why I love Lemmy. Where else would you get a well reasoned explanation like this?
Five comments down, maybe, but I’ll take what we can get.
I can’t say I’m surprised by this, and while I hate Trump, it’s not for the cynical reason. It’s going to be quite the nightmare unwinding those transactions. My understanding is that NY doesn’t have a right of redemption after a Sheriff’s sale. While this is judicious, I would prefer Trump be given no quarter.
-
If they started auctioning off and selling his properties to make money, it would turn over a lot of really dark stones full of other people’s criminal activities.
He’s being protected by the club he’s in, not because they like him but because they would be in trouble if they didn’t.
That’s the basis of the system, mutually assurred corruption.
That’s why Epstein Epsteined himself
More over, the precedent set here is beneficial to other wealthy individuals.
Other wealthy individuals, even those who sit on the complete opposite side of Trump politically benefit from the appeals court’s judgement. It really is just corruption all over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkoKLXcZbu0
This is a great story by a great Canadian wanted to fight the corruption. He was supposed by it ultimately.
But you can see a lot of parallels today.
Do these judges have to explain their decision? Is there an opinion published somewhere? I’d love to understand what context brought them to this conclusion, I’ve never heard of someone gaining leniency because they couldn’t afford the fine.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee, I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”…
The published order is just that. It doesn’t explain the why or whatever just “We are reducing the bond amount and not removing the other limitations of the ruling”
“…because Project 2025”
There’s an old saying in Tennessee, I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee
You know we’re fucked when I’m nostalgic for a time when Republicans were just dumb fucks trying to make their friends rich, rather than dumb fucks trying to destroy our democracy.
Isn’t the first one a prerequisite for the second one?
Banks, mega corporations, (fake) rich people get bailed out — Republicans: Nothing.
Working-class doing public service get minor bailout with student loan forgiveness — Republicans: WHOA, NOW…
Sigh. Evergreen:
I have lost all faith in our justice system.
“Justice system” is a misnomer. “Legal system” is more apt.
I have lost all faith in our
justicesystem.There was never reason to have faith in it to begin with.
It’s a justice system that began with maintaining the institution of chattel slavery and continues to maintain the institution of slavery through the prison system, and convicting black people more often and for longer sentences.
Rules for thee but not me me!!
Damn. I was really hoping this would be a ray of light for the next year and a reduction in the level of election insanity we’re going to see.
Instead, just more fuel for the flames.
Theres been a lot of shit over the last few years that really have put into perspective how if you have enough money in America you can get away with anything and this is maybe in the top 3, this guy should be in state prison and the management of the cases and responses have made it so he’s been a free man for nearly a decade, what the fuck.
Pretty timely considering Boeing just executed their whistleblower with no consequences.
Violence would solve this problem.
It would, but it would also create lots of new problems. I would regain some hope for humanity, though, if the people finally woke up to the reality of their 350,000,000:1 ratio against their oppressors…
Yeah, people forget America needed a revolution to become America when the system was failing.
He should have been forced to sell all of his properties prior to his presidency.
Dianne T. Renwick, Anil C. Singh, Lizbeth González, Bahaati E. Pitt-Burke, and Kelly O’Neill Levy
What was their actual individual motivation?
So we can all just do whatever we want without consequences right? Or is it still just rich fascists the rules don’t apply to?
