CNN legal analysts on Monday predicted New York Attorney General Letitia James will most likely move to seize former President Donald Trump’s bank accounts if he does not post a nearly half a billion dollar bond.
Trump faces a Monday deadline to post an appeals bond of over $450 million to cover the judgment for allegedly falsifying his company’s assets to get loans for business ventures. While James filed court documents in March to begin the process of seizing the former president’s commercial property in Westchester, New York, two prosecutors on “CNN News Central” said they believe she will probably go for his bank accounts first if he does not make the bond, as his lawyers have indicated he is unable to do. (RELATED: Trump Posts $91 Million Bond As He Appeals E. Jean Carroll Verdict)
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CNN Legal Analysts Predict Letitia James’ Likely First Target If Trump Doesn’t Post Bond pic.twitter.com/DXhw7FdP0T
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“Well, the problem here is there are assets all over the place, right? So Tish James has to decide where to go first,” former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers said. “Do you go to a bank and issue a judgment with a bank and try to seize, freeze and then seize a bank account?”
“The real estate takes more time, so it’s not even like just one thing where she walks into a clerk’s office and plunks down a piece of paper and says, ‘we’ve done it,’ right? So what she would do, I suppose, is disperse her people around to the asset she’s decided to prioritize, which are going to be, I think, the bank accounts and they’ll start filing the papers so I think we’ll probably hear from her. She’ll probably make a statement when she does that.”
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth to be $2.6 billion, mostly comprised of “hard” assets, like commercial property. The former president’s attorneys recently claimed Trump is unable to post the bond as bond insurance companies strongly prefer cash to real estate.
“I think it would be [a] smarter move to wait if we think … the appeal is going to be decided in this week or soon thereafter because you don’t want to start that process only to roll it back,” former Manhattan prosecutor Jeremy Saland said. “So I think, though, that she will go to the banks first because that’s easy. You’ve identified that asset. You can seize that asset. You send in, in New York City would be a sheriff or you can send a martial. They take a piece of that pie and the rest of it goes to the state of New York. It’s fairly simple.”
James recently took the initial action towards seizing former Trump’s assets by filing judgments against him on March 6 with the clerk’s office in Westchester County, where the former president owns a golf resort and private estate called Seven Springs, according to Bloomberg News.
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