Seth Abramson article below from today below
There is another article published yesterday which is also worth a read. Happy to post it if anyone's interested
Authored by a former federal criminal investigator, this list gives the NYC federal court overseeing E. Jean Carroll case’s against Trump details on what’s gravely wrong about his proposed bond.
SETH ABRAMSON
10 MAR 2024
∙ PAID
Introduction
Most major-media reporting on Donald Trump’s proposed $91.6 million supersedeas bond from Chubb, a large insurance carrier, emphasizes that Chubb’s CEO is a former Trump adviser, Evan Greenberg—and that Greenberg, who spent four years (2018 to 2022) working on the President Trump-created Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, almost certainly signed off on the massive financial risk for Chubb that it stands on the cusp of assuming and objectively makes no business sense for the firm.
See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples of such coverage.
Perhaps because Trump has so many other major professional milestones coming up—he’s likely to clinch the Republican Party
presidential nomination this week; he goes to trial on 34 felonies in New York City in 16 days; and he faces a deadline to pay $454 million in yet another civil suit related to his tortious conduct in New York state on the very same day his criminal trial begins, March 25—or perhaps because Greenberg did the bare minimum we would expect of any American after the January 6 armed rebellion (as the Washington Post approvingly notes, but without the italics mindfully added by this author, Trump’s new lender “condemned efforts to keep Trump in power after the January 6 insurrection”), it seems that many in major media are ready to move on from Trump’s bizarre, eleventh-hour procuring of what indisputably is one of the strangest bond proposals in the history of civil litigation in the United States.
So before we address the additional major breaking news about this bond proposal in exhaustive detail—including revealing harrowing new details about its relationship to key past events involving Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—some added background on what U.S. major media inexplicably isn’t telling its readers is required.
Trump’s Dodgy Bond Proposal Has Not Been Accepted By the Court
Nearly every major-media report this author could find on Trump’s bond falsely said that the bond had been “posted”—suggesting that it’s a done deal about which there is no purpose in media continuing to report. But in fact accepting the bond as already conclusively posted is exactly what U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan didn’t do.
In a strange juxtaposition, the New York Times simultaneously reportsthat Trump has “posted” bond and that Trump’s legal team has in fact merely “asked Judge Kaplan to approve the bond.” As an attorney as well as a journalist and a longtime journalism professor, this author can report that only the latter framing is accurate: while Trump has indeed secured a bond with an insurance carrier, he has not actually posted a bond.
This distinction is due, however, to a quirk of this particular case that the Times (again without any obvious explanation) somehow both reports on and fails to account for in its reporting. That is, the Times is correct to imply that an uncontested bond is usually reported on as “posted” as soon as it’s “secured”—which is the practice the Times has adopted here—but the problem is that Trump isn’t the conventional litigant, and as a result his second civil-suit loss to journalist E. Jean Carroll isn’t a typical legal defeat.
Trump has a long and well-documented history of lying to courts, lenders, and party opponents in civil cases—and for that reason Judge Kaplan, as the Times does correctly note, on Friday (yesterday) “gave [E. Jean] Carroll until 11AM [on] Monday to file any response to the proposed bond, and said that if she had any opposition to its form or amount, the judge would hold a hearing that afternoon [March 11] on the matter.”
This is an astounding development that could easily have led major-media coverage of Trump’s bond situation rather than, as was the case with the Times, getting relegated to the thirteenth paragraph of the relevant reporting. Why? Well, for several reasons:
Donald Trump Is Actually Broke
The New York Times has buried another game-changing lede in its coverage of Trump’s bond proposal, namely that Trump is almost certainly broke.
This information is encoded in the following sentence: “The terms of Trump’s bond deal have not been publicly disclosed, but bonding companies often charge a fee of anywhere between 1% and 3%, and require enough collateral to cover the bond.”
Keeping in mind here that a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, has already reported that, with just a matter of hours before a court-mandated deadline to issue a bond proposal, someone close to Trump’s legal team confessed to her that “there’s clearly a problem so far in acquiring a bond”, the bolded sentence in the paragraph above is astonishing. Why? Consider the following:
This means that either (a) no bond company anywhere in the world would deal with Trump at all, which would be international news because it would indicate the total abandonment of Trump by global markets; or (b) the bond companies were offering Trump bonds he could not afford, with the offers coming in somewhere above $916,000 to $2.75 million, a fact which would indicate that the self-claimed billionaire (he has said he had $10 billion in assets) is effectively bankrupt; or (c) Trump lacked even the collateral to secure a bond, as in this case approximately $90 million in collateral was required, which means either (i) Trump’s illiquid assets are almost worthless rather than worth the billions he claims, or (ii) no insurance carrier is willing to accept his valuations because he was just found liable for lying to his lenders about exactly this.
None of the foregoing was foregrounded by the major-media coverage of the pending bond proposal from Trump, which elision has the effect of obscuring how stunning it is that any company worldwide finally determined it was willing to bond Trump—and underscoring why Proof’s breaking news coverage of Kremlin ties to the Chubb Bond Proposal is so significant.
But there’s also a second significance to the facts above. If in fact Trump is now broke, it means all of the following are both true and confirmed:
This is a major national security issue, especially if Trump’s eleventh-hour emergency lender should be found to have any Kremlin ties at all. As established via the Mueller Report and multiple bipartisan congressional investigations, Trump has previously sought to receive financial benefits from the Kremlin at the same time that he was making public promises of government actions benefitting the Kremlin and its allies.
Donald Trump Has No Realistic Chance of Becoming President Again
This seems like an incredibly bald statement given that the latest presidential polling shows Trump and President Joe Biden neck-and-neck, with Biden winning three of the last five polls and topping 50% in the most recent poll for the first time in a year.
But consider the fact that the Chubb Bond Proposal isn’t the second, or third, or fifth, or even the tenth in the parade of legal challenges Mr. Trump is going to face in 2024.
Rather, it is just the first.
Here are some of the others:
So if Trump has in fact failed to get a valid bond in the first of his eighteen (minimum) 2024 extrapolitical legal battles, in what universe is he going to win an election that’s now a toss-up? As not just an attorney and a curatorial journalist but also a longtime political columnist, this author would term Donald Trump to now be at the very cusp of the most extraordinary nine-month shellacking in the history of American politics—keeping in mind that the above itemizing of his present obstacles is non-exhaustive.
Every entry above, for instance, has some sort of ancillary type of legal emergency that could accrue to it. These range from bail revocation hearings in his many criminal cases to emergency interlocutory appeals to the Supreme Court in all his cases; from congressional and law-enforcement subpoenas Trump on no account wants to honor to court proceedings stemming from his likely refusal to honor them; from “pile-on” lawsuits that use the success of January 6 civil suits against Trump thus far to justify new litigants bringing nearly identical lawsuits to new disclosures by associates about past Trump wrongdoing if and when those associates determine that Trump is going down for the count; and litigation over any post-conviction penalties in his criminal cases—for instance over whether and when he can be incarcerated, and whether such incarceration can be effectuated in a federal facility given Trump’s Secret Service protection—to ongoing ad hoc investigations into his physical state, likely addictions, mental health, cognitive abilities, and presumptive severe psychological conditions.
And none of this takes into account all of the hearings that will take place in federal courts in New York City should Trump’s March 11 and still-pending March 25 bond proposals be rejected and state officials begin seizing—and selling off—large Trump properties to pay his nearly half a billion dollars in personal debt. Given that Trump appears considerably more attached to his wealth than to his public service career, as a Trump biographer I would caution avid Trump fans against believing that Trump’s focus will continue to be on presidential politics as or when his real estate empire is facing state and federal liens and forced below-market sell-offs—as at that point only the prospect of being sentenced to state or federal prison in pending criminal cases will keep him even intermittently focused on winning the White House for the GOP.
No candidate in American history has faced even a fraction of what Trump is going to face in 2024, which on top of everything else places under a microscope whether the man can handle the stress of it all or will crack entirely—in consequence engaging in some new offense (e.g. a return to the public incitement of violence we saw on January 6) that will add to the long list above new federal criminal investigations that outstrip in scope and severity anything I’ve already itemized here.
All this said, it’s certainly not a good sign that so far major media, which very much wants and needs there to be a lucrative horse-race between President Joe Biden and Trump over the next nine months, is side-stepping almost every component of this first legal challenge Trump faces in order to make it seem to be one he already solved.
He hasn’t.
And beyond the major breaking news on this issue that Proof published yesterday—
There is another article published yesterday which is also worth a read. Happy to post it if anyone's interested
Authored by a former federal criminal investigator, this list gives the NYC federal court overseeing E. Jean Carroll case’s against Trump details on what’s gravely wrong about his proposed bond.
SETH ABRAMSON
10 MAR 2024
∙ PAID
Introduction
Most major-media reporting on Donald Trump’s proposed $91.6 million supersedeas bond from Chubb, a large insurance carrier, emphasizes that Chubb’s CEO is a former Trump adviser, Evan Greenberg—and that Greenberg, who spent four years (2018 to 2022) working on the President Trump-created Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations, almost certainly signed off on the massive financial risk for Chubb that it stands on the cusp of assuming and objectively makes no business sense for the firm.See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples of such coverage.
Perhaps because Trump has so many other major professional milestones coming up—he’s likely to clinch the Republican Party
presidential nomination this week; he goes to trial on 34 felonies in New York City in 16 days; and he faces a deadline to pay $454 million in yet another civil suit related to his tortious conduct in New York state on the very same day his criminal trial begins, March 25—or perhaps because Greenberg did the bare minimum we would expect of any American after the January 6 armed rebellion (as the Washington Post approvingly notes, but without the italics mindfully added by this author, Trump’s new lender “condemned efforts to keep Trump in power after the January 6 insurrection”), it seems that many in major media are ready to move on from Trump’s bizarre, eleventh-hour procuring of what indisputably is one of the strangest bond proposals in the history of civil litigation in the United States.
So before we address the additional major breaking news about this bond proposal in exhaustive detail—including revealing harrowing new details about its relationship to key past events involving Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—some added background on what U.S. major media inexplicably isn’t telling its readers is required.
Trump’s Dodgy Bond Proposal Has Not Been Accepted By the Court
Nearly every major-media report this author could find on Trump’s bond falsely said that the bond had been “posted”—suggesting that it’s a done deal about which there is no purpose in media continuing to report. But in fact accepting the bond as already conclusively posted is exactly what U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan didn’t do.In a strange juxtaposition, the New York Times simultaneously reportsthat Trump has “posted” bond and that Trump’s legal team has in fact merely “asked Judge Kaplan to approve the bond.” As an attorney as well as a journalist and a longtime journalism professor, this author can report that only the latter framing is accurate: while Trump has indeed secured a bond with an insurance carrier, he has not actually posted a bond.
This distinction is due, however, to a quirk of this particular case that the Times (again without any obvious explanation) somehow both reports on and fails to account for in its reporting. That is, the Times is correct to imply that an uncontested bond is usually reported on as “posted” as soon as it’s “secured”—which is the practice the Times has adopted here—but the problem is that Trump isn’t the conventional litigant, and as a result his second civil-suit loss to journalist E. Jean Carroll isn’t a typical legal defeat.
Trump has a long and well-documented history of lying to courts, lenders, and party opponents in civil cases—and for that reason Judge Kaplan, as the Times does correctly note, on Friday (yesterday) “gave [E. Jean] Carroll until 11AM [on] Monday to file any response to the proposed bond, and said that if she had any opposition to its form or amount, the judge would hold a hearing that afternoon [March 11] on the matter.”
This is an astounding development that could easily have led major-media coverage of Trump’s bond situation rather than, as was the case with the Times, getting relegated to the thirteenth paragraph of the relevant reporting. Why? Well, for several reasons:
- As noted, it means Trump hasn’t “posted bond” in this historic case, and every headline claiming otherwise—which, sadly, is nearly all of them—is incorrect.
- In fact, Trump has “proposed a bond” in his case, which means it is the duty of every major media outlet to report on whether his proposal is legally sound. By not accurately reporting on the major national news story in this way, some in media have abandoned their duty to professionally analyze Trump’s new bond proposal via research, legal analysis, and historic contextualization of the bond proposal within Trump’s astonishingly checkered legal and financial history.
- The biggest open question in the United States this weekend is therefore whether E. Jean Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan will challenge Trump’s proposal as they have been invited to do by Judge Kaplan (no relation). Because U.S. major media has fewer journalistic resources to bring to bear on weekends—for the obvious reason that employees are entitled to a weekend break—it’s convenient for media to pretend that this major weekend news story with significant national security implications isn’t happening at all. I can confirm, having been a working journalist for thirty years and having worked also as a journalism professor for many years (during which period the study of corporate media was one of my academic foci), the hope within American corporate media is likely that (a) Carroll won’t challenge the Trump bond proposal, making any work it could and should be doing this weekend seemingly moot, or (b) if she
- does challenge the proposal, most readers of major media won’t notice or care that major media launched its coverage of that stunningly significant story several days after it actually began. Judge Kaplan almost certainly doesn’t regularly issue orders like the one he did yesterday, which makes the order itself worthy of discrete reporting rather than it being buried amongst a story that inaccurately claims Trump already “posted” bond (adding then, in the fine print, that Trump lawyer Alina Habba has merely “proposed” a bond). In my years of experience as a trial attorney, judges do not see a need to invite parties to object to bonds through written orders because that invitation is always tacit. Parties can always object via motion to any action taken by the party opposite if they believe it was for some reason legally infirm. The reasoning behind Judge Kaplan issuing his Friday order is therefore, more than likely, because he understands that Trump has a uniquely rich and sordid history of attempting to escape his debts via subterfuge. For a federal court to implicitly acknowledge this with respect the presumptive Republican Party nominee for President of the United States isn’t just unprecedented and therefore astounding but could itself warrant a second discrete course of reporting from major media that we as American news consumers curiously aren’t getting this weekend. The effect of this non-reportage is obfuscation of the fact that the federal court system understands Donald Trump to be a scofflaw of highly irregular proportion and scope.
Donald Trump Is Actually Broke
The New York Times has buried another game-changing lede in its coverage of Trump’s bond proposal, namely that Trump is almost certainly broke.This information is encoded in the following sentence: “The terms of Trump’s bond deal have not been publicly disclosed, but bonding companies often charge a fee of anywhere between 1% and 3%, and require enough collateral to cover the bond.”
Keeping in mind here that a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, has already reported that, with just a matter of hours before a court-mandated deadline to issue a bond proposal, someone close to Trump’s legal team confessed to her that “there’s clearly a problem so far in acquiring a bond”, the bolded sentence in the paragraph above is astonishing. Why? Consider the following:
- The bond proposed by Trump to Judge Kaplan is a $91.6 million bond;
- the Times indicates that Trump likely purchased the bond for somewhere between $916,000 to $2.75 million (1% to 3% of its face value);
- Trump previously testified under oath that he had $400 million in liquid assets with which to instantly pay any civil judgment; and yet
- the Times says that, until the eleventh hour, Trump couldn’t secure any bond.
This means that either (a) no bond company anywhere in the world would deal with Trump at all, which would be international news because it would indicate the total abandonment of Trump by global markets; or (b) the bond companies were offering Trump bonds he could not afford, with the offers coming in somewhere above $916,000 to $2.75 million, a fact which would indicate that the self-claimed billionaire (he has said he had $10 billion in assets) is effectively bankrupt; or (c) Trump lacked even the collateral to secure a bond, as in this case approximately $90 million in collateral was required, which means either (i) Trump’s illiquid assets are almost worthless rather than worth the billions he claims, or (ii) no insurance carrier is willing to accept his valuations because he was just found liable for lying to his lenders about exactly this.
None of the foregoing was foregrounded by the major-media coverage of the pending bond proposal from Trump, which elision has the effect of obscuring how stunning it is that any company worldwide finally determined it was willing to bond Trump—and underscoring why Proof’s breaking news coverage of Kremlin ties to the Chubb Bond Proposal is so significant.
But there’s also a second significance to the facts above. If in fact Trump is now broke, it means all of the following are both true and confirmed:
- Trump has been lying to all U.S. voters about his situation throughout the primary;
- he’s been lying to the RNC about his situation throughout the primary;
- he’s been lying to both small donors and mega-donors about his situation throughout the primary;
- any hostile foreign power could compromise Trump by promising him solvency;
- his attempt to take over the RNC via his daughter-in-law Lara Trump is far more likely than we previously realized to be part of a Criminal Conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws and steal money from the Republican Party not just to pay his own legal fees (which in some cases is allowable) but to stay solvent and evade personal bankruptcy at least until Election Day, which use of RNC funds would be illegal; and
- in order to secure a bond, he had to put himself at the mercy of his bondsman by revealing that unless he’s bonded he might have to declare personal bankruptcy, an even that could so dismantle his political image that it would make his 2024 re-election to the White House an impossibility.
This is a major national security issue, especially if Trump’s eleventh-hour emergency lender should be found to have any Kremlin ties at all. As established via the Mueller Report and multiple bipartisan congressional investigations, Trump has previously sought to receive financial benefits from the Kremlin at the same time that he was making public promises of government actions benefitting the Kremlin and its allies.
Donald Trump Has No Realistic Chance of Becoming President Again
This seems like an incredibly bald statement given that the latest presidential polling shows Trump and President Joe Biden neck-and-neck, with Biden winning three of the last five polls and topping 50% in the most recent poll for the first time in a year.But consider the fact that the Chubb Bond Proposal isn’t the second, or third, or fifth, or even the tenth in the parade of legal challenges Mr. Trump is going to face in 2024.
Rather, it is just the first.
Here are some of the others:
- His March 17 injunction date in Delaware Chancery Court over alleged Fraud in financial transactions involving Truth Socialand (more broadly) Trump Media;
- his March 25 trial on 34 felonies in New York City;
- his March 25 deadline to secure a bond five times the size of the Chubb Bond Proposal in the Trump Organization case he just lost to the New York Attorney General’s Office;
- his April 25 oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, which, if he loses, as expected, will strip any slight veneer of “presidential immunity” from him for all present and future criminal and civil cases;
- his May trial on federal felonies in Florida;
- his July trial on state felonies in Georgia;
- his August trial on federal felonies in D.C. (subject to a delay related to #4, above);
- three federal civil suits over January 6—two brought by elected Democratic Party officials in their personal capacity, and a third one brought by two federal law enforcement agents—that have just survived summary judgment and will now be heard at hearings throughout 2024;
- a possible third Defamation suit to be filed against him by E. Jean Carroll in 2024 in view of the now-presumptively defamatory statements he made about her at a recent Michigan campaign rally (statements made following his second loss to her in federal court on the very same issue in federal court);
- the ongoing 2022 DHS and DOJ investigation into whether Trump’s trusted political director and agent Anthony Ornatoordered U.S. Secret Service agents to illegally wipe their phones after January 6 as part of a criminal conspiracy;
- possible additional federal indictments in D.C. over January 6 to be brought by DOJ independent special counsel Jack Smith;
- the nearly inevitable federal investigations into whether Trump will be violating federal law in raiding Republican Party coffers to pay what the law establishes as “personal” expenses;
- likely civil litigation to be filed by past Trump attorneys to recover more than $50 million in still-unpaid legal fees;
- a likely federal Tax Fraud investigation over a just-revealed fake $50 million “loan” Trump used to steal money from the federal government and American taxpayers;
- a likely state Perjury investigation, now that the New York State Attorney General’s Office has no doubt that Trump lied under oath in a late 2022 deposition about the amount he had available to pay future civil judgments;
- a federal counterintelligence investigation to be conducted over the coming months to determine if Trump has cleared any or all of his past red flags to become eligible to receive counterintelligence briefings this summer as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee; and
- inevitable overseas civil proceedings pursuing Trump over a nearly $400,000 debt he now owes to former MI6 agent Christopher Steele due to a frivolous lawsuit Trump filed against him, which judgment there is no way Trump will willingly pay pre-election due to his contempt for Steele, his contempt for foreign courts, the possible fallout from such a payment for his narrative on Russian collusion, and his history of not paying even debts he privately acknowledges as legitimate.
So if Trump has in fact failed to get a valid bond in the first of his eighteen (minimum) 2024 extrapolitical legal battles, in what universe is he going to win an election that’s now a toss-up? As not just an attorney and a curatorial journalist but also a longtime political columnist, this author would term Donald Trump to now be at the very cusp of the most extraordinary nine-month shellacking in the history of American politics—keeping in mind that the above itemizing of his present obstacles is non-exhaustive.
Every entry above, for instance, has some sort of ancillary type of legal emergency that could accrue to it. These range from bail revocation hearings in his many criminal cases to emergency interlocutory appeals to the Supreme Court in all his cases; from congressional and law-enforcement subpoenas Trump on no account wants to honor to court proceedings stemming from his likely refusal to honor them; from “pile-on” lawsuits that use the success of January 6 civil suits against Trump thus far to justify new litigants bringing nearly identical lawsuits to new disclosures by associates about past Trump wrongdoing if and when those associates determine that Trump is going down for the count; and litigation over any post-conviction penalties in his criminal cases—for instance over whether and when he can be incarcerated, and whether such incarceration can be effectuated in a federal facility given Trump’s Secret Service protection—to ongoing ad hoc investigations into his physical state, likely addictions, mental health, cognitive abilities, and presumptive severe psychological conditions.
And none of this takes into account all of the hearings that will take place in federal courts in New York City should Trump’s March 11 and still-pending March 25 bond proposals be rejected and state officials begin seizing—and selling off—large Trump properties to pay his nearly half a billion dollars in personal debt. Given that Trump appears considerably more attached to his wealth than to his public service career, as a Trump biographer I would caution avid Trump fans against believing that Trump’s focus will continue to be on presidential politics as or when his real estate empire is facing state and federal liens and forced below-market sell-offs—as at that point only the prospect of being sentenced to state or federal prison in pending criminal cases will keep him even intermittently focused on winning the White House for the GOP.
No candidate in American history has faced even a fraction of what Trump is going to face in 2024, which on top of everything else places under a microscope whether the man can handle the stress of it all or will crack entirely—in consequence engaging in some new offense (e.g. a return to the public incitement of violence we saw on January 6) that will add to the long list above new federal criminal investigations that outstrip in scope and severity anything I’ve already itemized here.
All this said, it’s certainly not a good sign that so far major media, which very much wants and needs there to be a lucrative horse-race between President Joe Biden and Trump over the next nine months, is side-stepping almost every component of this first legal challenge Trump faces in order to make it seem to be one he already solved.
He hasn’t.
And beyond the major breaking news on this issue that Proof published yesterday—
