In 2022, New York attorney general Letitia James alleged in a lawsuit that Donald Trump and his children knowingly inflated the value of Trump’s assets in order to receive more favorable loans from banks and insurers.
After Judge Arthur Engoron handed down hundreds of million dollars in penalties against the former president last week, a victorious James suggested that those same assets could now be seized if Trump is unable to pay up.
“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment-enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James said in an interview with ABC News.
James raised the possibility that some of Trump’s famed properties in New York could potentially be seized in order to fulfill the ruling. “We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers, and yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day,” James said, referring to Trump’s Financial District building, which is next door to the attorney general’s own office.
The threat of the potential loss of the former president’s iconic buildings like Trump Tower or 40 Wall Street is not a new one. In an earlier summary judgment, Engoron ordered the business certificates for Trump’s companies be canceled, an action that could’ve imperiled the future of his corporate empire and ownership of his namesake properties. But the judge ultimately declined to pursue that route in his final ruling.
In an interview with NPR, Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander suggested that Trump will likely find a way to come up with the money rather than see his properties change hands.
“I don’t think that that’s a likely thing. I think that we’re going to see him put up the cash or secure a bond or other type of loan to do that,” he said.
In his ruling against Trump last week, Engoron barred the former president from running a New York corporation for three years and levied a $355 million penalty against him. Trump is also on the hook for approximately $100 million in pre-judgment interest. Then there’s the matter of post-judgment interest, which will tack on $87,500 daily until the fine is paid. Trump has vowed to appeal the ruling, but has 30 days from the ruling to put up either cash or a bond while the matter is worked out in court.
And those fines are on top of the penalties he is expected to pay writer E. Jean Carroll in her two cases against him. Last May, Trump was found liable for both sexual abuse and defamation against Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million in damages. In January, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll in a subsequent defamation case.
Trump has railed against the ruling in the days after it was revealed, calling Engoron and James “crooked” and “corrupt,” respectively, on social media. In response to Trump’s rhetoric, James said that he “appeals to the worst in our society.”
During a Fox News town hall held Tuesday, the former president strangely invoked the fate of Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who recently died in a penal colony, when asked how he intends to pay the penalty in the civil fraud case.
“It’s a form of Navalny. It is a form of communism or fascism,” he said.
