Courts cut Trump’s bond to $175 million, but set April trial date

Donald Trump’s sprawling Trump Tower triplex isn’t headed to the auction block after all.

Not yet, at least.

On Monday, a state appeals court gave the former president a big break by slashing the bond he must post to block enforcement of the recent fraud judgment against him while he appeals.

A five-member panel of appeals court judges allowed Mr. Trump to put up only $175 million to cover the nearly half-billion-dollar civil verdict. Mr. Trump’s lawyers had argued that obtaining a bond big enough to cover the entire judgment, plus accrued interest, would have forced him to unload valuable real estate assets at fire-sale prices.

The appeals panel may have been comfortable with allowing the smaller bond due to those very assets. Mr. Trump’s well-known buildings and golf courses are visible and valuable, and aren’t going anywhere. They would be easy for New York Attorney General Letitia James to seize if the full judgment is upheld on appeal and the former president does not have the cash to pay the full amount.

“Trump is a real estate magnate, and that is a thing that makes him particularly easy to hold accountable,” says Will Thomas, assistant professor of business law at the University of Michigan.

Mr. Trump now has 10 days to come up with the $175 million bond under Monday’s appeals court ruling. That means he has postponed a possible financial crunch, in which the cash demands of this case collide with the $91 million sexual assault and defamation judgment against him and in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll. Together, the bond costs could possibly drain him and his company of most of its liquid assets.

On Monday, that bit of good news for Mr. Trump may have been counterbalanced by events in his criminal New York case on charges related to his alleged payment of hush money to a porn star. The presiding judge rejected Trump lawyers’ arguments for delay due to a late delivery of documents related to the case from federal prosecutors, and reiterated that the trial will start April 15. It will be the first time in American history a former president has faced criminal charges in a courtroom.

In the New York civil trial, Judge Arthur Engoron found that Mr. Trump, his elder sons, and his business had knowingly falsified the values of some real estate assets to obtain lower interest rates. The $454 million judgment in the case was based on the money that prosecutors estimated the Trump Organization had saved via the falsehoods, and profits from two buildings sold during the period covered by the charges.

Under state law, Mr. Trump is required to post a bond equal to the judgment in order to stay collection of what he owes while he pursues an appeal. Monday’s appellate order did not explain why judges reduced the amount necessary. But experts noted that they may simply have decided to split the $350 million difference between Judge Engoron’s full judgment and the $100 million bond that Trump lawyers last week said was all the former president could afford.

Whether the reduction presages anything about Mr. Trump’s appeal prospects is unclear.

Judge Engoron’s determination that the Trump team grossly overstated the values of its holdings is likely to be affirmed by the appeals court, says Gregory Germain, director of the bankruptcy clinic at Syracuse University College of Law.

However, there may be legitimate legal issues for review on appeal about how the trial judge determined damages in the case, says Professor Germain.

“So the [$175 million] amount probably doesn’t tell us what Trump should have to pay,” he says. “Rather, it was an arbitrary figure set in an amount that Trump could likely afford, but more than Trump asked for, to make sure that he is afforded a fair opportunity to make his case on appeal.”