A Democrat who sits on the House Financial Services Committee warned that former President Donald Trump’s inability to secure a bond for his $464 million fraud judgment makes him a “massive national security risk.”
Trump’s lawyers in a filing on Monday told a New York appeals court that he cannot secure a bond after approaching 30 underwriters.
“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” the attorneys wrote.
The filing quoted an insurance broker who signed an affidavit stating that securing the bond is a “practical impossibility.”
“Enforcing an impossible bond requirement as a condition of appeal would inflict manifest irreparable injury on Defendants,” the attorneys wrote, asking for a stay while also requesting oral arguments if the court considers denying the request.
“The presumptive @GOP nominee for President is desperate for $464M (and counting) which he cannot personally access. That fact alone makes him a massive national security risk; any foreign adversary seeking to buy a President knows the price,” tweeted Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill.
Casten noted that all House lawmakers are required to post “regular reports of our assets and liabilities.”
“The fact that we don't know this about someone running for the highest office in the land shifts the liability onto our democracy itself,” he wrote.
The D.C.-based watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington previously warned that Trump’s mounting financial penalties make him “an even bigger threat to national security.”
“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump,” the group warned, adding: “Despite his financial ups and downs in office, one thing remained remarkably consistent: Trump’s laser focus on using the presidency to line his pockets.”
