Attorneys for Donald Trump declared Monday that he is unable to secure the $464 million bond due in his New York fraud case, saying that turning over the entire amount is "a practical impossibility" — and that development could lead to his New York empire becoming property of the state, a legal expert said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James could put a "padlock" on Trump Tower, legal analyst Glenn Kirschner told MSNBC, effectively locking the former president out of his iconic Fifth Avenue building and making it the property of New York.
Kirschner was responding to a question about how the state's Attorney General Letitia James will make sure the damages owed after Trump was found liable for fraud will be paid if he can't find the money.
"It would look like Tish James, figuratively speaking, putting a big New York state padlock on Trump Tower, for example," he said.
"How does she extract the value from it, does she put it on the market? Does the state actually take possession of it and convert it to a state owned property? I think the devil's in the details with respect to how she will actually go about extracting the value to satisfy the half-billion-dollar judgment."
Trump's attorneys claimed they have spent “countless hours negotiating with one of the largest insurance companies in the world,” and have also unsuccessfully asked 30 other companies to back the bond.
“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
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Kirschner added that the news is a sign that Trump's claim of being of in possession of $14 billion in assets was likely a lie.
"He is now being asked to put up a bond to secure basically a half-a-billion-dollar judgment, which would represent about one-twenty eighth of his entire assets as Donald Trump [and his lawyer Alina Habba] say," Kirschner said.
Kirschner went on to say that if Trump's assets are valued at the level he says they are, "I would think insurance companies and sureties would be beating down his door to do business with him."
"So it feels like this is perhaps the next-to-last step on the road to Donald Trump's financial demise," Kirschner said. "Because as we've been discussing, New York Attorney General Letitia James said she will absolutely begin seizing his properties to satisfy this money judgment that has been entered against him."
