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- cross-posted to:
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Less than a month after New York Attorney General Letitia James said she would be willing to seize former Republican President Donald Trump’s assets if he is unable to pay the $464 million required by last month’s judgment in his civil fraud case, Trump’s lawyers disclosed in court filings Monday that he had failed to secure a bond for the amount.
In the nearly 5,000-page filing, lawyers for Trump said it has proven a “practical impossibility” for Trump to secure a bond from any financial institutions in the state, as “about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets including real estate as collateral and have demanded cash and other liquid assets instead.
To get the institutions to agree to cover that $464 million judgment if Trump loses his appeal and fails to pay the state, he would have to pledge more than $550 million as collateral—“a sum he simply does not have,” reportedThe New York Times, despite his frequent boasting of his wealth and business prowess.
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Winning so hard it hurts
The Sound of His Squeal
Why would he need to raise the money? He told the court he had $500M in liquid assets.
Could it be that he was being untruthful in his statement to the court? I think there is a word for that.
He testified to $400M, and he already put up a $100M bond for the other thing. But the whole point of this is that he overvalues things, right? I bet when his people had to get down to the actual state of the accounts and not what DJT feels they are, it was probably only $200M or so that is liquid.
It’s not worth going after him again for overstating that in court. It’s too easy to skirt around. His punishment will come when the DA starts seizing and auctioning stuff to pay the judgement.
He put up I believe $2m for the other thing. The rest was covered by the bond company.
So he should still have at least $398m if he claimed 400…
That’s not quite how it works. When the bond company writes the bond, they don’t just take the $2m from the client and then the client is off the hook. They ask the client to put up collateral. So in order for Trump to secure this bond, he would have had to set aside the full amount of the bond and say “If the verdict doesn’t get reduced on appeal, I am giving you all this stuff, and not using it for anything else in the meantime”.
All Trump is getting for that fee is not actually having to sell those assets now, and have any overage refunded if the appeal gets the verdict reduced. (Given the interest rates right now, the passive income on that kind of cash is not trivial).
True, but we were talking only about liquid assets here, I thought. Otherwise, what would the $400m you mentioned be referring to? Or - what specifically did you mean and do you have a source by any chance?
A source for which part?
I’ve read some different things about what those bond companies will take as collateral. They are not likely to take on real estate as collateral. Not only is it a pain to unload, but the properties also likely have existing liens on them, reducing the value that can be recovered. The bond companies are well within their rights to say that they will only accept cash or marketable securities as collateral.
With how much Trump is known to fuck contractors I wouldn’t be surprised if the liens are more valuable than the properties themselves.
And it’s the fucking contractors that vote for him ffs.
Turkeys voting for Thanksgiving
I suspect that trump life is over if he fails to win in November, he will either take it himself or it will be effectively over bc he will be in jail and penny less. To that end he does not care about consequences of some extra crimes in the near term.
Nah, he’ll start screaming about rigged elections and try for a coup.
THAT he will do regardless of election outcome
Again
He’s a serial narcissist. Maybe one of the worst in the current world.
No way does he take his own life. That would require having empathy, which he absolutely does not have.
No. trump won’t take his own life. He’s not committed to any cause like someone like Hitler, nor does he feel backed into a corner.
What he’ll do instead is pander/cater to his unhinged base and con them out of what little money they have left.
That’s all after he pillages the coffers of the RNC for what he can use there to pay for his legal fees/woes.
It’s possible, and I don’t want to hope for too much here, but it’s possible, that trump maybe legit takes down most of the RNC/republicans if he fails to win in November.
If he wins though, I think we’re all pretty fucked. He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit. He has no morals, ethics, or shame.
He’ll use tax money to pay for that judgement or some shit.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse, both revenues and budget come from Congress. He’d have to get Congress to include paying his legal fees in the budget and manage to pass that budget. Then he could pay for the judgement with tax money.
You know that whole “fiscal cliff” thing that keeps happening? That’s a consequence of this - Congress assigns a maximum amount of debt that the President can issue bonds until it is reached to pay for things in the budget (issuing bonds is technically a power of Congress, but they delegate it up to a set value via legislation so that they don’t have to bother). Congress also assigns how much money will be spent on each thing (aka the budget). When the President is required to spend more by the budget than there is in tax revenue plus bonds he is allowed to issue, that’s the fiscal cliff. It’s literally a problem that Congress creates (by creating a budget that spends more than is available in taxes and bonds), that only Congress can fix (typically by raising the amount the President can issue in bonds), but that usually gets blamed on the President.
That’s good to know, thank you for the detailed explanation.
I’m still concerned he’ll do it, and his sycophant supporters will enable him and let him do it because they see this as him being politically persecuted. You’re probably right, but if trump wins, nothing is normal, there is no rule of law.
Can’t do that. President doesn’t control the purse
And we’ll see how well that statement holds up when it runs up against a candidate who’s already been impeached twice, is overleveraged and compromised from foreign assets, who’s ON RECORD HAVING SAID HE’D BE A DICTATOR WITH ALL THE POWERS OF A DICTATOR FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS HE WAS IN OFFICE IN HIS SECOND TERM.
That’s how dictatorships start, they ask for the powers for just a few, just a little bit, and then it never gets returned.
So I have low confidence that anything we consider rule of law today will be in effect if trump should win a second term, with all the insane support he’s got within the GOP right now that currently controls the lower house.
Maybe he was talking in terms of Zimbabwe dollars
Fat fucker has no clue Zimbabwe is a thing.
Best he can do is Man, Woman, Boat, Plane.
…i thought his was person, woman, man, camera, TV?..
Yeah, you’re right, you should be president I guess.
…ow; i walked right into that one!..
I thought he had claimed he didn’t? Do you know where I can find this information?
He testified last year that he had around $400 million in cash:
That’s still not enough.
Also giving up ALL your cash is a bad idea, you’d want to do that as a mix of cash and other assets, so he’d still need someone willing to use those as collateral.
You know what else is a bad idea? Fraud.
We wouldn’t give it up, he woild just use some of it as collateral for his bond. He gives insurance company $40,000,000 and they pay the full amount, or whatever they negotiate.
He doesn’t have enough cash for the down payment for his loan essentially.
This isn’t bail with a small risk of loss paid for by the guaranteed loss of 10% to the bondsman. This is 99% Chance of loss on a settled case with the reasonable expectation that Trump would fight collection tooth and nail, try to pay less than face via bankruptcy etc. It’s a risk of hundreds of millions of dollars that would take YEARS to settle. Years in which lenders could be earning returns if that money was invested elsewhere. 30 institutions said no.
He needs to secure the loan with cash or cash equivalents for the whole shebang. Nobody wants properties which he has already borrowed against even if the net of value and loan are positive to the tune of hundreds of millions its risky and challenging to sell. He should have started mortgaging when the judge told him he’d lost and they were only determining the scope of the loss so he could have obtained favorable terms.
He has to put up 550 million.
If he locks up 400 million (all his cash) he has no cash until this is over with and he gets it back and he can then sell assets if needed to cover it.
That’s not a good financial move for anyone.
No one wants to use any of his asset collateral because he’s lied about its worth so he has to use his cash.
Edit: to clarify, no one wants to risk 500 million if he gives them 50 because they don’t think they can get the 500 back from him if he tries to back out of it.
Again, as mentioned, whether it’s a good financial move or not, doesn’t really matter if he doesn’t have the capital to flex beyond meeting the requirements.
It’s a legal judgement. It might force him to do things that are not good financial moves. That’s tough shit in life for the rest of us too. The thing here is that trump’s never been held accountable, legally, for any of the crimes he’s committed before. This is what happens when one of the oligarchs falls off their throne and gets treated like the rest of us.
Of course, to him, he feels like this is unfair, because he’s never been made accountable. But this is just a fucking Tuesday for the 330+Million rest of us.
Just to be clear - I’m in no way shape or form supporting Trump. I’m just pointing out using all your cash, in any circumstance, is not a good idea. He has to solve his own problem even if it’s a bad situation
You don’t have the option of looking at a court judgement like an investment opportunity. This is a legal judgement. You don’t get to “hold onto cash” just because not having it would risk exposure or something.
You do this, or they start selling your assets off for an unflattering amount of money, and/or you can go to jail, or have all of the things you owned possessed and auctioned off to pay for the judgement.
The thing you don’t get to do is not pay.
This isn’t about him paying his legal bill, it’s about a bond to appeal.
Using all your cash to appeal is a bad idea for ANYONE
if you lose the appeal, you can then decide on your cash and asset mix to pay it off.
Edit: think about it this way. If you can put up asset collateral on a appeal that’ll take a year, that’s a whole year you could be earning interest on the cash and have cash for an emergency. Maybe you go half and half so you don’t risk as much of the other assets. Leaving yourself with no cash is just bad. He’s in a really bad situation so maybe he only has bad options, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad.
That’s fair. You’re correct, I wasn’t thinking about it in that context.
It’s Trump…I’m sure he claimed both and neither.
Lol entirely possible
Could it be that he was being untruthful in his statement to the court? I think there is a word for that.
cnn: (from yesterday news) “told fictional stories”
Fuck even liberal media won’t call a spade a spade.
Yeah, everyone’s scared of using the L-word because of the legal liabilities involved. And if I was the editor, I would 100% assume trump would attempt to fucking sue my paper for libel if I say anything that gives him an inch.
So that’s probably why everyone’s scared of saying “Lied”, because trump can, will, and has sued people for things like that.
I’ll believe it when it happens.
Last time he had one lined up but up until the last second said it was impossible. Likely to maximize donations from his rubes.
Re: Donations, I saw this today. So it may not be that easy (ha!!).
Behind Trump’s campaign cash crunch: Small-dollar donor fatigue, major donor hesitation
KEY POINTS
- Former President Donald Trump is facing two major fundraising problems: a shortage of big money interest and a drop in small-dollar donor support.
- The decline in small-dollar contributors could be a significant obstacle, as the former president seeks to cobble together a 2024 war chest.
- Small-dollar donors are critical to Trump’s ability to raise enough money to fund his presidential campaign.
If you owe the bank half a billion dollars, it’s the bank’s problem right?
Sounds like the banks don’t want this problem.
Wait, how in the world could this have been a 5000-page filing? Is the entire text of War and Peace included 3 times in an appendix?
The point is to make the case difficult and time consuming, hoping to cause a delay. One common method I have seen is to print every email in an email chain. The efficient way would be to print the last email in a 30 reply long chain and have it make up about 5 pages of the filing. Instead of doing that though, you can print every email in the chain and turn it in to 50+ pages pretty easily. Trump does not want this case to be handled efficiently and having a 5000+ lage filing, full of repeated and unnecessary information is one way to make that happen.
Lol 5000 pages thrown at the likes of a cutting edge LLM is like a plank length of reading.
Glad technology is crushing that dumb loophole.
Edit: Lol people downvoting this are a good 6 months behind AI news.
You cannot rely on a LLM to summarise accuratly
Plus, that’s not a good task for an llm because its context window would almost certainly be too short.
It would “hallucinate” because it could only “remember” a fraction of the content and then everyone would be all pissy because they used the program wrong.
I mean you can pretty simply just engineer around that. Dumping 5k pages is obviously an idiotic way of approaching the issue. But having an LLM going through 500 words at a time, with 125 words of overlap in each sequence to pull out key words, phrases, and intentions, then put that into a structured data form like a JSON. Then parse the JSONs to pick up on regions where specific sets of phrases and words occur. Give those sections in part or entirely to the LLM again; again have it give you structured output. Further parse and repeat. Do all of these actions several times to get a probability distribution of each assumption around what is being said or is intended. Build the results into a Bayes net, or however you like, to get at the most likely summaries of what the document is saying. These results can then be manually reviewed. If you are touchy, you can even adjust the sensitivity to pick up on much more nuanced reads of the text.
Like, if the limit of your imagination is throwing spaghetti against a wall, obviously your results are going to turn out like shit. But with a bit of hand holding, some structure and engineering, LLM’s can be made to substantially outperform their (average) human counter parts. They do already. Use them in a more probabilistic way to create distributions around the assumptions they make, and you can set up a system which will vastly outperform what an individual human can do.
(just asked up the thread:)
GPT-4 & Claude 3 Opus have made little summarization oopsies for me this past week. You’d trust ‘em in such a high profile case?
if you end them 100 times over the same text?
LLMs are still pretty limited, but I would agree with you that if there was a single task at which they can excel, it’s translating and summarizing. They also have much bigger contexts than 500 words. I think ChatGPT has a 32k token context which is certainly enough to summarize entire chapters at a time.
You’d definitely need to review the result by hand, but AI could suggest certain key things to look for.
LLMs are still pretty limited,
People were doing this somewhat effectively with garbage Markov chains and it was ‘ok’. There is research going on right now doing precisely what I described. I know because I wrote a demo for the researcher whose team wanted to do this, and we’re not even using fine tuned LLMs. You can overcome much of the issues around ‘hallucinations’ by just repeating the same thing several times to get to a probability. There are teams funded in the hundreds of millions to build the engineering around these things. Wrap calls in enough engineering and get the bumper rails into place and the current generation of LLM’s are completely capable of what I described.
This current generation of AI revolution is just getting started. We’re in the ‘deep blue’ phase where people are shocked that an AI can even do the thing as good or better than humans. We’ll be at alpha-go in a few years, and we simply won’t recognize the world we live in. In a decade, it will be the AI as the authority and people will be questioning allowing humans to do certain things.
Exactly. There is already one recent case where a lawyer filed a brief generated by an LLM. The judge is the one that discovered the cited cases were works of fiction created by the LLM and had no actual basis in law. To say that the lawyer looked foolish is putting it lightly…
Right, but that’s not what we’re talking about here - we’re not saying “Hey LLM, write a convincing sounding legal argument for X”, we’re saying “Hey LLM, here’s a massive block of text, summarize what you can and give me references to places in the text that answer my questions so I can look at the actual text as part of building my own convincing sounding legal argument for X.”
It’s the difference between doing a report on a topic by just quoting the Wikipedia article, versus using the Wikipedia article to get a list of useful sources on the topic.
But you can use it as a tool to assist. If it finds something actionable, you can confirm the old-fashioned way, by doing the actual reading.
until it just makes stuff up, as they have done
There are specialized LLMs that (if the document is digitized) will actually cite their references within the data they’ve been given and provide direct links. It’d still need proof reading as someone would have to check those citations but it would still speed up the process immensley.
I’ve used AI. I’ve had it make stuff up or put incorrect info into documents. I’m smart* and read through the document just like these lawyers will**. Saved me TONS of time vs just doing all the specific writing, scanning and summarizing. *citation required **smartness not withstanding
You cannot rely on a LLM to summarise accuratly
You can’t rely on people to summarize it accurately either. Humans make mistakes too. The difference is that I can ask an LLM to do the summarizing 10x, and calculate a statistical probability of a given statement being present or true in the text, at a very low cost. Just because LLM’s aren’t 100% reliable doesn’t make humans the best bar to rely upon either.
Lol 5000 pages thrown at the likes of a cutting edge LLM is like a plank length of reading.
You do understand that they’re talking about paper, right? Even if you were feeding it to an LLM – and you wouldn’t be, because that would be legal malpractice – it would take a non-trivial amount of time just to scan it in!
It’s the legal equivalent of paying somebody with a wheelbarrow of pennies.
I think when we discuss large volumes of paper it is often the case that much of it is irrelevant and not overly hard to sort an analyze. EG he is asserting that its impossible for him to afford to do this. You don’t need to actually keep reading the statements of his resources to each of the 30 institutions he applied to nor all the refusals unless its likely that something therein may be meaningful. We can probably read ONE and skim another and conclude that the statement that he can’t raise the bond by pledging encumbered real estate he’s constantly lied about won’t work.
You do understand that AI is fully capable of reading paper, instantaneously?
Digitizing books is childs play
People downvoting me in this chain are months if not years behind AI news. Paralegals won’t have jobs in 3 years. Lawyers won’t have jobs in 5-10.
You’re refuting my comment about how humans have to laboriously scan in the documents with… a video of a human laboriously scanning in a document?
For 5000 pages, we’re still talking about hours of human labor just to operate the scanner, even if it’s a fast one.
No we aren’t. They are automated.
And actual robots are currently capable of operating them. Completely autonomously.
Again, y’all are months, if not years behind AI news.
No we aren’t. They are automated.
Your own video showed a fucking human, dude.
Paralegals won’t have jobs in 3 years. Lawyers won’t have jobs in 5-10.
I think you’re only partially right about paralegals, but lawyers will be fine because of how the profession is protected. It’s essentially a guild system, where you have to be a part of the lawyer’s guild (aka the bar) to legally be allowed to lawyer. And AI cannot join regardless of how good it is because lawyers want to keep their jobs. It would take legislation breaking the requirement to be a member of the bar to lawyer to change that, but the people writing legislation are themselves mostly members of the bar.
I won’t disagree but, I mean, if I’m a lawyer and I have a law firm, I’d rather split my millions with me and my robots. And I think there’s enough like minded greedy lawyers running law firms to set it in motion.
Except instead of you having to split your revenue with your fellow lawyers and having the work split among hundreds of similar firms, you now don’t have to split it, but the available lawyering work is split among everyone who can buy a chunk of compute. Unless you being an actual human lawyer is still advantageous, in which case we wouldn’t be at the point where AI is actually replacing lawyers.
I don’t think lawyers/Judges/procesecutors in a high profile multimillion dollar fraud case are using AI. This would be something they are used to and know how to deal with. And I don’t think this size of report would be out of the ordinary for a case like this. A lot of it probably doesn’t need to be read but is included for completeness. For example, only a few transactions over the course of a few years may be needed to prove fraud. But the entire transaction list from that time would be included as an appendix for reference.
The smart ones absolutely are using AI. The Judges might not, but the lawyers and prosecution certainly are. They don’t have to directly cite AI, but can simply use it to point out the salient bits and save themselves a LOT of time digging for info that they want.
I don’t know much about AI but wouldn’t a “simple” pattern recognition software do a better job of eliminating unnecessary copies of email chains?
No need to summarize everything if you can just cut the waste.
GPT-4 & Claude 3 Opus have made little summarization oopsies for me this past week. You’d trust ‘em in such a high profile case?
Maybe it included documents or correspondence from each of the 30 attempts? That would still be absurdly long at over 150 pages of documentation per attempt. But I could see them trying to make a point through the sheer volume of pages.
Probably a lot of print offs of large excel account sheets too.
Exhibits attached to motions consisting of rejection letters, loan and credit applications, attachments to each of those … it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
I wouldn’t normally put this much stock in his assets actually getting flipped, but…
Someone or some company signed me up for Trump fundraising emails recently. The subject line of one from 2(?) days ago read: HANDS OFF TRUMP TOWER, so it sounds like they’re preparing some kind of mobilization/campaign to play the victim now that their options are quickly drying up.
I think I’d actually welcome that tactic from the Trump campaign. The base aren’t going to change their mind no matter what they hear but I’d be willing to bet a good portion of swing voters will hear about Trump losing his tower and realize that hey, maybe he’s actually not a great businessman. It makes him look weak when the only tactic that really works for him is the strongman one.
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it sounds like they’re preparing some kind of mobilization/campaign to play the victim now that their options are quickly drying up.
Not disagreeing with you, but just wanted to point out that’s kind of their thing already.
Oh for sure, the spoiled child is ready for their tantrum du jour.
Letitia James did say she had her eye on that building in particular, so of course they want to keep it out of her hands.
Won’t somebody think of Trump Tower?!?!
“about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets
well yeah they’re lending him money to pay off a court judgment against him for lying about what those assets are worth. I wouldn’t lend someone money if their collateral was worth anywhere from 10%-1000% of what I lent them and there was no way for me to verify either. Besides, you know if he owes you money it’s gonna be years and millions before you can recoup anything at all.
Remember he testified that he had that kind of liquidity several times. He is absolutely fucked.
Ok guys, i dont want to sound like a conspiricy theorist or anything, but sometimes i get a slight suspicion that he might be lying to make himself look better…
No waaay. Why would a guy with a gold toilette have an ego like that?
Who would lie under oath though?
Hopefully his continued complaints and stalling would result in perjury?
…nearly 5,000-page filing…
Really? They generated more content than the entire Harry Potter series to say “He can’t get the money.”
Sounds like they’re trying to get their own $464M out of the deal.
How is that even possible good lord? 5000 pages?
Odds are there are charts, graphs, and other items that are inconsequential to the overall argument. Also could include the full rejection letters.
Yeah I would guess its all of the submitted documents back and forth 30 times. Even just 150 pages each would net 5000 pages.
Take. The. Tower!
Better yet, take Mar a Lago. It’s his house but because he has to cheat at everything, he has it registered as a business for zoning reasons IIRC. On top of that, he says it’s worth hundreds of millions where in reality it’s only valued for $30 mil at most. He might actually have a stroke.
They’re gonna take some of his properties and find lots of other crimes in those closets.
Crimes and hamburder wrappers
Crimes and hamburder wrappers
You just named the inevitable trump saga movie.
I’m looking forward to the Trump Cinematic Universe. Maybe they can finally get all their lore straight.
There is no canon in the TCU.
How could they? Trump can’t even keep his lore straight.
You love to see it.
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A FORMER President, or what we also call a private citizen. If you’re thinking that you’re buying a President with a 500 mil bond, then you’re betting on him winning against the guy he lost against last time, which feels like as good a bet as taking Trump’s claims of what his properties are worth at face value.
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I don’t have a half of a billion dollars but I’m watching the Vegas line and I might put a couple grand down on Trump winning. I’m not American. I don’t get a vote…but I’ll make some money off it if I can.
I think he’s going to win. Americans have shown themselves to be not very smart and you’ve got places like Michigan claiming they’re not going to vote for Biden because they think Trump is going to… Well They are stupid but they represent America.
This is such a stupid comment. You don’t even live here!
The polls show him leading, so do the pundits. He’s going to win for the same reason he did last time, you people are too ignorant to understand that he appeals to a huge swath of the country.
Your American exceptionalism is failing your society and you’re too blind to see it. Pride and greed. It’s wild to see.
[Excellent]
I would love to see Trump Tower rebranded to something like Barack Obama Tower, just to piss him off even more.
It’s probably going to be one of those things where he keeps insisting that whatever property comes with the Trump brand, despite this adding negative value.
Clinton Tower
No, no, you’d want to name it for a black civil rights activist from the 60s who never rose to national prominence but is from NYC, that way his tower is named after someone who’s both black and he wouldn’t think was important enough even if he were white.
