Apparently the damages against Donald Trump in his business fraud case have been accumulating interest at a 9% annual rate for several years:
- On profits from the sale of the Old Post Office: interest is owed since May 2022.
- On profits from the sale of Ferry Point: interest is owed since June 2023.
- On everything else: interest is owed since March 2019.
This all comes to $98.6 million so far, bumping Trump's fine to $454 million. It will continue rising by about $2.7 million per month while appeals are ongoing, which means Trump is likely to owe more than $500 million if he ultimately loses his appeals and the amount of the fine stands.
TRIVIA FACT OF THE DAY: New York Attorney General Tish James, who brought the fraud suit against Trump, is exactly one day older than me.
This is great news against the fraudster Donald Trump-----but he still didn't rape Ms. Carroll (that case was a fraudulent.)
Here's a question to consider: since Trump is so integrated into the legal and financial institutions aka 'he can't exist outside of our institutions.'
What can he do to....... NOT PAY?????
And you know the case was fraudulent HOW?
A jury who heard the evidence says you can go fuck yourself.
Say what you will about him (and I do); dude has expensive hobbies.
Local dead beat real estate grifter runs tor president and doesn't think his resume will catch up with him. What a fricken idiot! For years he tied people up in the courts with shyster lawyers and bogus law suits, now he up against people with deep pockets and better lawyers than him and he doesn't know what to do except play the same old shit.
The day it was announced Trump would be president, I said 2 things:
1 - We will get to see if all the screaming about terrorists all over the world want to hurt us is true. Why? With Trump, the president had very soft targets all over the world. Firing a few rifle shots at golfers at a Trump course would cripple play (and money flow). A bomb at the door of a Trump building would hurt business. You wouldn't even have to hurt anybody.
Did that happen. No!
2 - A lifetime criminal put himself in the biggest spotlight in the world. BAD IDEA. His criminal past will get exposed and prosecuted.
Did that happen? The accountability for being a criminal is happening right now.
#2 occurred to me as well. Like, dude, why? You're getting away with all this stuff by cruising just below the radar. Why stick your head up?
Pretty sure the classical Greek tragedians have this one covered already, but still ...
#2 occurred to me as well. Like, dude, why? You're getting away with all this stuff by cruising just below the radar. Why stick your head up?
It has occurred to me, too. But Trump didn't intentionally "stick his head up." He entered the context as a branding project to strengthen his visibility in the runup to negotiations with NBC. And then lightning struck. In theory he could have bowed out before sewing up the nomination; but he wasn't expecting to win, in any event.
I can’t believe that even someone as egotistical as Trump actually thought he would win. It just looked like a great way to buff up the name and grift a couple of hundred million dollars.
Pretty much like George Santos, but on a grander scale.
The problem for them is, they both won.
I guess neither of them ever saw The Producers.
So true
And in the meantime, he has to pay the judgment into escrow or post a bond (and incur the associated fees).
Estimates I've seen of his assets are all over the map. Some say hundreds of millions liquid, others say not so much so he'd have to sell or accept a lien on real property. And then some say his property is already so encumbered that nobody would touch it, but others disagree. And THEN there's speculation about nation-state sugar-daddies like MBS or Putin coming through with the money.
But at the end of the day, I don't think that matters much. Cash will come from somewhere. But the blow to his IMAGE is tremendous. And the blow to his SELF-image may be even worse. In those respects at least, justice has been done.
People like David Cay Johnston who know his business record seem to think he's always been on the ragged edge for liquid cash. So one of his biggest cons has been living large, like he's got all the money in the world.
Right now his problems are even worse than they seem at first blush because the judgment doesn't allow him to borrow from banks or institutions in NY, which has to include most if not all of what another thread says is about 10 outfits in the US that could cover it. The encumbrance thing you mention really complicates it for either borrowing or bonding-- there are also suspect valuations to worry about (the best ones ironically might be in the ruling), and also deed restrictions that make residual value very complex to figure out. Apparently he has 30 days to fork over or bond in order to appeal and the complications would make that really hard for normal businesses to step up.
So we're left with the Bank of MBS or the Russian Oligarch Trust (how about that acronym, I just noticed). But I'd have to think their most likely thing wouldn't be a cash transfer (complicated reporting, etc) but maybe transferring or liquidating assets already in the US; not sure they'd have the brass to pledge them in the open, but maybe-- this is trump and no usual rules apply, after all.
Agree about the self-image damage, but not so much about public image, not with the MAGA crowd. With them it'll just be more proof how desperate the deep state is to take him out because he's got their number so dead on, etc. True believers will turn anything into a reason to believe.
"And THEN there's speculation about nation-state sugar-daddies like MBS or Putin coming through with the money."
It will be entertaining to guess how MAGA will reconcile this with their outrage over the fiction that the Biden family accepted money from China.
The properties that Trump owns are worth a few billion (probably). But he has loans against those properties, and nobody seems to know exactly how big those loans are.
I expect he is going to have to sell some of those properties to pay his judgements, and then we will all discover how big those loans are, and get a better idea of what he is actually worth.
No way to sell them (or even get a loan against them) in 30 days.
He is well and truly screwed.
Being involved in 7 different legal cases within the same time frame is costing him tens of millions of dollars in legal fees. Along with all the fines, it wouldn't be surprising if his total payout reaches a quarter of a billion dollars.
Presumably with the coming takeover of the GOP political party leadership, it will be fully funding all of his legal fees including fines, making the GOP a de facto political org under the Trump Corporation, aka the Trump Reich.
This is an interesting one. The RNC is short on cash -- like single-figure millions net of debt -- so they're not a very big piggy-bank. And one of the reasons they're short on cash is, he's already hoovering up a lot of the donations, particularly from the SMALL donors. So the RNC is left with the BIG donors, and if things happen as you say -- and I have no doubt they will -- the question becomes, will the (few) BIG donors keep donating, knowing that he's just gonna take the money for his own uses?
ETTD. The memo's been circulating for a while. Funny how few people seem to have read it ...
There are true believers among the rich, but I wouldn't discount the cumulative funding of the poor and middle class true believers, nor the ambivalent party members who will unintentionally fund the Trump Reich.
No idea about that -- dunno whether the five-to-a-hundred crowd is anywhere near tapped out yet. But from what I've read, they're already mostly donating to his PACs, not the RNC, so the latter is kind of irrelevant as regards them.
I have no doubt the billionaires would shovel money at him if he were a little more of a stable autocrat and less of a self-obsessed huckster. But I wonder whether they're beginning to wonder whether to gamble on him right now. The economy's doing pretty fkin well under Biden ...
This gets to a question I have about so many of his supporters who are most het up about Ds and taxes. How can they not understand that whatever taxes they'll pay under Ds will ultimately be dwarfed under a trumpist regime by what they'll end up paying in tribute to RNC, PACs, super-PACs, lobbying firms, as "voluntary" celebration occasions, and for do-nothing patronage employees and placements and other kinds of protection rackets?
Take the K Street project and multiply it out to eat up the free revenue of corporate America. That's where a trumpist regime ends up.
Well, at least in that scenario their money won't be going to help brown people.
Maybe Trump's lawyer will loan him the money. Apparently, lawyers just do that sometimes.
There's a non-zero chance that one of the Republican-dominated state governments gives him a "loan" for the amount, either as a budget request or out of rainy day funds. He himself might start asking for it if it looks like he'll have to mortgage everything under the sun to pay the bill.
Seriously?
More likely to be his buddy MBS, though Kushner.
Don't put anything (and I mean ANYTHING) past them
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2024/02/15/arizona-republican-bill-legislature-appoint-electors-trump/72607177007/
Yep. The Florida legislature proposed a multimillion “Freedom Fighters Fund” to pay Trump’s legal bills.
Enough about the former president. How are Junior and Eric supposed to pay their fines? There's a rumor their father intends to take it out of their allowances! And that damn interfering woman the court appointed to supervise the Trump Organization won't let them claim the fines as business expenses!
They are the true victims here.
So I've heard the phrase "prejudgment interest" before and knew broadly what it is but after reading half a dozen articles about this story on the major news sites didn't see a single explanation of how the $98 million in PJI that Trump owes in the case was calculated. One quick stroll to Jabberwocking and there is is right on the home page. Thanks Kev!
Trump should ignore it. Tell NY to drop dead. No one will lift a finger to stop him.
Courts don’t ignore foreclosure actions, even when debtors do.
trump hated Jerry Nadler & John McCain because they knew just how much he got away with in NYC.
Wish that both of them could be watching how Letitia James has accomplished this now. Didn't agree with McCain's positions on much, but appreciated his saving the ACA.