Trump’s Bond Is So Weak, Letitia James May Still Seize His Assets

Donald Trump, with the help of “the king of subprime car loans,” has posted the $175 million bond for his civil fraud case, ostensibly giving him time to appeal the $454 million judgment against him for inflating his wealth in his business dealings. There’s just one problem: New York Attorney General Letitia James isn’t buying it.

By posting the bond, which was lowered upon appeal of the original figure, Trump theoretically delayed the state of New York seizing his assets. After all, as the bond supposedly indicates, he’s good for the money. But as more information on the surety backing the bond surfaces, it’s not clear that’s true.

According to Newsweek, James is arguing that Trump must file a motion by Monday guaranteeing that either he or the surety can be “justified.” She cited a statute that dictates Trump or Knight Specialty Insurance Company, which underwrote his bond, have 10 days to prove they are good for the bond. If they can’t, the bond will be declared “without effect” and James can begin seizing Trump’s assets to cover the judgment.

It would be an embarrassing end to the bond saga, which has seen the former president and former ultrarich person reduced to hawking sneakers and meme stocks to cover his legal fees. Most recently, he’s enlisted the help of Knight Specialty Insurance Company to back the $175 million. After Trump put up the bond on April 1, the court’s filing system rejected it due to paperwork errors, prompting James to question the solvency of Knight Specialty, which is not licensed as an insurer in New York.

As it turns out, the company has nowhere near the capital and surplus to guarantee Trump’s bond. What’s more, the legal document it produced does not seem to promise to pay the full penalty if Trump’s appeal fails.

As a result, Trump may not be off the hook after all. It might just cost him a few of his favorite properties.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is in a terrible political position, and his caucus knows it.

With a razor-thin margin to spare on any vote, Johnson has spent much of his term either stalling on advancing conservative policy goals or working with Democrats in order to pass anything—much to the chagrin of his party. If Johnson was hoping that last week’s recess would cool in-party tensions and help him rein in his caucus, then his plan hasn’t panned out in the slightest.

“Certainly, the speaker has a tough time right now trying to figure out, sort of, the path forward with the slim majority that we have,” Republican Study Committee Chair Representative Kevin Hern told The Daily Beast.

So far, Johnson has wavered on sending more aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia, reauthorizing a surveillance program, and sending articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate. The aide described holding off on sending the Mayorkas impeachment articles as “another example of the clusterfuck that is the House under Speaker Johnson.”

Unfortunately for Johnson, at this point, any decision could be fatal for the speaker’s tenure at the top of the House.

“Look, this is not your father’s Republican Party, as that old saying goes, this is a different breed of cat. This is … Trump runs that party. He maintains a sort of a death grip on it,” President Joe Biden told Univision News on Tuesday, adding that he believes Johnson is “worried about losing the speakership” under the circumstances.

Since taking the gavel in a surprise election that saw more seasoned Republican leaders fail to galvanize the party, Johnson has struggled to carry out even the most basic responsibilities of Congress. It doesn’t help that he inherited a historically divided GOP that, even before he took over, constituted the majority of one of the least productive congressional sessions in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to remove Johnson from his office looms large. She resumed her attacks against him on Tuesday, issuing a memo to her Republican colleagues in an attempt to curry support for Johnson’s ousting.

“If these actions by the leader of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican Party—we are a uniparty that is hellbent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction,” she wrote. “I will neither support nor take part in any of that, and neither will the people we represent.”

Last month, Greene filed a motion to vacate Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, putting a cap on a half-year ordeal to accomplish one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government.

But biding time seems to be a winning strategy for the Georgia Republican. As the weeks pass, more Republicans have started to openly voice their frustrations with Johnson, including Representative Thomas Massie, who accused the Louisiana lawmaker of failing to meet conservative goals.

Each dissenting voice is critical. A vote to strip the gavel from Johnson needs just three GOP dissenters under the current makeup of the House, but could drop down to two if Greene decides to wait for Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher’s retirement on April 19.

Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to perjury in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial, was sentenced Wednesday to five months in prison.

Weisselberg admitted to New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg that he lied under oath in July 2020 about knowing that Trump overvalued his Manhattan apartment. Trump was found to have consistently lied about his fortune to prop up his real estate business.

The Republican presidential nominee recently posted the $175 million bond, with the help of right-wing billionaire Don Hankey, while he appeals the $454 million judgment in the fraud case.

Weisselberg was found guilty of perjury in March. He has been a longtime ally and confidant of Trump’s and was rewarded for his loyalty over the years with under-the-table benefits, including expensive apartments and cars, which also served to mask a massive tax fraud scheme.

This is the second five-month sentence for Weisselberg: He was also found guilty of tax fraud in 2022, having helped the Trump Organization hide unreported income from New York City and state tax authorities. He served 100 days of the original sentence.

Arizona lawmakers were gung ho for banning abortion—until they got what they wanted.

On Tuesday, the state’s Supreme Court decided to revive a draconian ban on the medical procedure. But already, several prominent—and politically vulnerable—Arizona Republicans have come out against it.

Senate candidate Kari Lake, for instance, identifies as “100 percent pro-life” and had previously called the ban a “great law” but suddenly decided it wasn’t her cup of tea once the decision arrived.

“I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on [Governor] Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support,” Lake said in a statement. “Ultimately, Arizona voters will make the decision on the ballot come November.”

Two of the state’s GOP representatives, both of whom are facing fierce competition from Democrats in elections this year, also torched the decision. Representative David Schweikert—who has spent the better part of his career working to outlaw abortion with zero exceptions—wrote that he did not support the ruling and that the Arizona legislature should “address this issue immediately.” Representative Juan Ciscomani, a freshman lawmaker representing one of the state’s swing districts, called it a “disaster for women and providers.”

“In Arizona, our 15 week law protected the rights of women and new life. It respected women and the difficult decision of ending a pregnancy—one I will never personally experience and won’t pretend to understand,” Ciscomani wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “I oppose a national abortion ban. The territorial law is archaic. We must do better for women and I call on our state policymakers to immediately address this in a bipartisan manner.”

Just two years ago, Ciscomani described himself as “proudly Pro-Life” and cheered the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Former Republican Governor Doug Doucey also lamented the decision, even though he was responsible for appointing four of the justices who contributed to the court’s majority opinion.

“I signed the 15-week law as Governor because it is thoughtful policy, and an approach to this very sensitive issue that Arizonans can actually agree on,” Ducey said in a statement. “The ruling today is not the outcome I would have preferred, and I call on our elected leaders to heed the will of the people and address this issue with a policy that is workable and reflective of our electorate.”

The flip-flopping is no coincidence, especially as abortion has become a losing issue for Republicans nationwide. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nationwide abortion access proved disastrous for Republicans last November, resulting in major losses in districts where abortion was a key talking point. Postelection, those raw numbers turned into some stunning platform reversals for the conservative party, with GOP consultants referring to the turning tide on the issue as a “major wake-up call.”

Ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has a theory as to the motivation behind the motion to vacate filed by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz. And it has little to do with policy differences.

In an interview Tuesday at Georgetown University, McCarthy, sounding Not Mad, said it was a “misnomer and a lie” that alleged concessions to congressional Democrats during debt-ceiling talks were behind his removal. He offered to set the record straight about why he was removed as speaker.

“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old. An ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker, and that’s illegal, and I’m not going to get in the middle. Did he do it or not? I don’t know, but Ethics is looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it,” McCarthy explained.

That one person? Gaetz, the ringleader of the successful effort to vacate the speakership.

It’s an explosive, if not exactly new, allegation by McCarthy. Gaetz, who is scheduled to be deposed in June as part of a civil defamation suit, is accused of several child sex crimes. One of the “other people in jail” to whom McCarthy is referring is convicted sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, who has alleged that Gaetz paid him via Venmo to have sex with a 17-year-old girl. Greenberg is cooperating with the House Ethic Committee, which is investigating the allegations. Gaetz is separately accused of paying another woman for her participation in alleged drug-fueled sex parties.

Gaetz, for what it’s worth, has corroborated McCarthy’s theory, at least behind closed doors. The Daily Beast reported that the Florida congressman has privately admitted that the move to oust McCarthy was revenge for McCarthy’s refusal to squash the ethics probe, not a stand against bipartisan negotiation.

McCarthy, who has endorsed convicted rapist Donald Trump for the presidency, became the first speaker of the House in American history to be removed through a motion to vacate. Still, he claims he’d “do it all over again.”

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has personal reasons for wanting to defend the January 6 rioters: At least one of his staffers may have been among them.

The campaign has attempted in recent days to distance itself from its New York state director, Rita Palma, since she claimed the campaign’s real goal was to act as a spoiler to President Joe Biden.

“The only way that Trump can even, remote possibility of taking New York is if Bobby is on the ballot. If it’s Trump versus Biden, Biden wins. Biden wins six days, seven days a week. With Bobby in the mix, anything can happen,” Palma said in a meeting with New York Republicans.

But it has since become clear that Palma has deeper ties to Donald Trump. In social media posts analyzed by CNN, the staffer has repeatedly called the GOP presidential nominee her “favorite president,” said she would vote for him in 2024 while also suggesting a 2028 run, blamed the “rigged election” for the violence on January 6, and even admitted to being in attendance on the day that Trump supporters seized the U.S. Capitol.

“Jan 6 was not a riot. A small group of people were trouble. It was 99.9 peaceful, respectful. I was there,” she wrote.

Over the last week, Kennedy’s campaign has flip-flopped more than once on its January 6 messaging. On Thursday, the independent presidential candidate issued a fundraising email referring to the rioters as “activists.” The next day, Kennedy claimed that particular language was made in error but he still didn’t believe the event amounted to a “true insurrection” since the rioters didn’t wield weapons—though that is completely false, since the rioters did wield weapons and can be seen doing so in mountains of recorded video from the day.

The rioters attacked Capitol Police officers with firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even used hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen officers to the hospital.

Then, on Monday, Kennedy appeared to backtrack again on the correction. Appearing on NewsNation, the 70-year-old claimed that his campaign had made “a couple of mistakes” in issuing the revised statement while again insisting that the events weren’t an insurrection.

“I think that there were people who were there who wanted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another. I would say it was a very traumatic day in our nation’s history and people committed criminal acts. Those people deserve to be in jail,” Kennedy said.

Donald Trump’s financial house of cards is beginning to collapse.

The Republican presidential nominee, who’s made his personal wealth central to his candidacy since 2016, has fallen off the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The list is a daily ranking of the 500 richest people in the world, and as of Tuesday, Trump no longer qualifies.

The blow comes just days after the price of Trump Media stock plummeted and two main investors behind the merger between Trump Media and Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, and Digital World Acquisition Corporation, a shell company, were charged with insider trading.

Trump has already been struggling to prove his wealth following the revelation that the surety firm backing the $175 million bond in his civil fraud trial is insolvent, unlicensed in New York, and may not have actually agreed to pay the penalty if Trump cannot come up with the money.

Originally valued at $8 billion, Trump Media has lost half its value since it debuted in March. The drop in value does little to dispel allegations that the stock is a potential pump-and-dump scheme concocted by Trump to funnel credulous supporters’ money toward his mounting legal debts. He cannot sell or borrow against his shares in Trump Media for six months, so while this latest embarrassment is mostly a cosmetic hit to his net worth, it’s still possible that he’ll have suckered enough of his voters into paying off a chunk of the judgments against him when all is said and done.

In the meantime, though, Trump has become just another temporarily embarrassed billionaire.

Alabama’s secretary of state claimed Tuesday that, according to state law, the Democratic National Convention is taking place too late for the party to get its nominees for president and vice president on the state’s November ballot.

Wes Allen, a Republican, said Alabama has an August 15 deadline for political parties to present a certification of nomination for president and vice president. The Democratic National Convention takes place in Chicago on August 19.

“If this Office has not received a valid certificate of nomination from the Democratic Party following its convention by the statutory deadline, I will be unable to certify the names of the Democratic Party’s candidates for President and Vice President for ballot preparation for the 2024 general election,” Allen said in a letter to Randy Kelley, chair of the Alabama Democratic Party.

Alabama state law says parties must certify their candidates “no later than the 82nd day preceding the day fixed for the election.” This year’s election is on November 5, making August 15 the eighty-second preceding day, Allen said in the letter. His office claims that the 82-day deadline has been in Alabama’s election law since 1975.

This is the second red-state election chief to claim that the Democrats are holding their nominating convention too late. Last week, Paul DiSantis, the chief counsel for Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, said that state law required presidential candidates to be certified 90 days before a general election.

Both the Ohio and Alabama secretaries of state said that the problem could be fixed if the respective legislatures passed a one-time exception, or if the Democratic National Committee moved its convention to within the allowed time frame.

While both Allen and LaRose could well be trying to simply uphold state laws, the moves seem remarkably suspicious given recent lawsuits regarding Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The Colorado state Supreme Court attempted to kick Trump off the 2024 ballot due to his role in the January 6 insurrection, which the justices determined violated Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In March, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s decision, and by extension similar decisions in two other states, in an expedited, unanimous ruling that said states couldn’t individually enforce the clause against federal officeholders. Five of the court’s conservative justices even said that the clause only applied if Congress passed a law to affirm it.

Based on that ruling, if Ohio and Alabama dig their heels in and refuse to allow President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on their ballots, the Supreme Court will have to swiftly reinstate them, since states don’t have the authority to remove federal officeholders, right? But that would require consistency from John Roberts’s Supreme Court, whose values are in question.

Republicans have quickly adopted Donald Trump’s latest abortion signaling, with one House member already regurgitating the GOP presidential nominee’s blatant lie on national television that Democrats want to “execute” babies after birth.

North Carolina Representative Greg Murphy continued Tuesday to weave the yarn on Fox Business, telling host Maria Bartiromo that Democrats want to kill kids when they’re “coming out of the birth canal.”

“Yeah, [abortion’s] going to be a big issue every time, because you have folks really on both sides, really probably more Democrats, that want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal, always to force the issue,” Murphy said. “Because it’s an emotionally charged issue, and that’s what elections are, they’re emotionally charged events.”

Trump has been on every side of the abortion debate over the last 25 years, even describing himself as “very pro-choice” in 1999. But on Monday, the former president released a video statement ostensibly clarifying his position on the issue but really avoiding taking an actual stance on pending abortion rights ballot initiatives around the country—and slamming Democrats for something they simply aren’t doing: “supporting execution after birth.”

“Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars—both sides—wanted and in fact demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade. They wanted it ended,” Trump said. “It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth, and that’s exactly what it is, the baby is born and the baby is executed after birth, is unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”

That, however, is completely false. No one has advocated for the death of children.

Trump’s stance angered people on both sides of the aisle: Conservatives wanted him to back a federal abortion ban, while abortion rights advocates warned that by claiming he thought the states should set abortion regulations, Trump was really backing the most draconian restrictions on the procedure.

Shortly after dropping the video on Truth Social, Trump issued another cloaked warning to Democrats, suggesting that their inaction on the issue will be their downfall.

“You know the Democrats are ‘reeling’ when they have no response to my recent Statement on Abortion, other than, ‘He’s only kidding. He will change it’ or, ‘He won’t do that, he’ll do something else,’” he posted. “I guess this means that we will win the Election because they are so bad on every Issue, this is the only Issue they are focused on!”

Far-right provocateur Jacob Wohl and lobbyist Jack Burkman have a history of promoting conspiracy theories, unsuccessfully trying to frame public figures for made-up sexual assaults, and saying fraudulent things. Now they have to pay more than $1 million for a robocall scheme meant to discourage Black voters during the 2020 election.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has reached a settlement with the pair, who were found to have violated the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act by a New York federal judge in 2023. Wohl and Burkman have been ordered to pay “up to $1.25 million” in the deal.

“The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, and it belongs to everyone,” James said in a statement released on Tuesday. “We will not allow anyone to threaten that right. Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a depraved and disinformation-ridden campaign to intimidate Black voters in an attempt to sway the election in favor of their preferred candidate.”

The calls, directed at areas with predominantly Black populations, made wild claims during the summer of 2020 about how voting by mail was unsafe. The robocalls insisted that voting by mail would put people’s personal data at risk of being used by local law enforcement to track old warrants, used by credit card companies to collect debts, and even used to make a database for “mandatory vaccines.” The robocalls mentioned Burkman and Wohl by name, making it easy for authorities to connect the effort to the pair.

Tuesday’s settlement is not the only legal consequence the two face for their voter intimidation efforts, which also affected Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and several other states. In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission fined Burkman and Wohl $5,134,500 for the scheme, the largest penalty ever at the time it was proposed under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. In Ohio, Burkman and Wohl were each sentenced to community service, $2,500 fines, and probation. In Michigan, the case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

If the pair fail to pay at least $105,000 of the fine to the New York attorney general’s office, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and people harmed by the scheme by December 31, 2024, the fine’s amount will increase to $1.25 million.