BREAKING NEWS: The New Questions Federal Investigators Must Ask on An Emergency Basis About Trump’s Eleventh-Hour Bond Proposal—Whose Apparent Kremlin Connections Increase By the Hour

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.

ABOVE: Convicted Kremlin spy Maria Butina and her onetime associate, former Russian bank co-owner Maurice “Hank” Greenberg—the father and former boss of new Trump financial patron Evan Greenberg, whose Chubb Limited now hopes to back the nearly bankrupt criminal defendant to the tune of over $91 million dollars.

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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 reports that 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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:

1. The bond proposed by Trump to Judge Kaplan is a $91.6 million bond;

2. 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);

3. Trump previously testified under oath that he had $400 million in liquid assets with which to instantly pay any civil judgment; and yet

4. 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:

1. Trump has been lying to all U.S. voters about his situation throughout the primary;

2. he’s been lying to the RNC about his situation throughout the primary;

3. he’s been lying to both small donors and mega-donors about his situation throughout the primary;

4. any hostile foreign power could compromise Trump by promising him solvency;

5. 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

6. 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 last point is critical because it inextricably entwines Trump’s bond proposal with not just his financial future, not just the future of his liberty (pursuant to his pending criminal cases), but also his political future. Which means questions about whether Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg had a political motive in bonding Trump are amplified in importance, as bonding Trump now effectively means saving his political career and buying a portion of his future domestic and foreign policy.

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:

1. His March 17 injunction date in Delaware Chancery Court over alleged Fraud in financial transactions involving Truth Social and (more broadly) Trump Media;

2. his March 25 trial on 34 felonies in New York City;

3. 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;

4. 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;

5. his May trial on federal felonies in Florida;

6. his July trial on state felonies in Georgia;

7. his August trial on federal felonies in D.C. (subject to a delay related to #4, above);

8. 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;

9. 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);

10. the ongoing 2022 DHS and DOJ investigation into whether Trump’s trusted political director and agent Anthony Ornato ordered U.S. Secret Service agents to illegally wipe their phones after January 6 as part of a criminal conspiracy;

11. possible additional federal indictments in D.C. over January 6 to be brought by DOJ independent special counsel Jack Smith;

12. 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;

13. likely civil litigation to be filed by past Trump attorneys to recover more than $50 million in still-unpaid legal fees;

14. 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;

15. 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;

16. 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

17. 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.

This is a non-exhaustive list of what we can expect Donald Trump to be facing over the next nine months—all of it outside of his conventional political maneuvers in seeking to regain the Oval Office.

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—

—the additional major breaking news below contextualizes everything that looks to be profoundly wrong about the Chubb Bond Proposal, confirming that major media is falling down on this story in a way that, given all its national security implications, is unforgivable.

With such clearly inadequate coverage in mind, and considering the fact that—again per a buried lede in the New York Times—the journalist Trump raped in the 1980s, E. Jean Carroll, has until Monday morning to object to the aforementioned bond, Proof here continues its groundbreaking news coverage from yesterday with substantial new facts about individuals tied to the Chubb bond. These new facts would seem to require a show cause hearing now be scheduled in the Carroll case by Judge Lewis Kaplan.

The facts below are complex, harrowing, and raise questions about the Chubb bond the likes of which perhaps no American court has ever had cause to ask of any litigant or his insurance carrier. In reading the questions below, Proof urges readers to recall that mere hours before his deadline to secure a bond the Times reported that Trump had been unable to secure one. The reasons for this were widely known: Trump faces 91 state and federal felonies, with more possibly forthcoming; he is subject to half a billion dollars in civil judgments he appears to have no hope of overturning on appeal, and virtually no liquid assets available with which he can honor them; he appears to have lied under oath in one of his three pending civil cases in New York City about the amount of his liquid assets; and he has a decades-long documented history of lying to lenders, suing lenders, and attempting to destroy international or domestic institutions that loan him money and subsequently seek to collect on resulting debts.

{Note: As America is less than 24 hours into this breaking news story, the questions below are preliminary and non-exhaustive—for all that they will likely shock any reader who hasn’t read the Proof Trilogy. Readers may notice that one of the most significant outstanding issues in this fact-pattern, namely the conversations Trump may or may not have had with Chubb about his $90 million of in-kind or real collateral, are still only tangentially dealt with below.}

The Questions Federal Investigators and Judge Lewis Kaplan Need Immediate Answers to As to Donald Trump’s $91.6 Million Bond Proposal

{Note: This report incorporates this internationally viral breaking news report from yesterday.}

(1) According to a Politico report, Kremlin agent Dimitri Simes was CEO of D.C.’s “Center for the National Interest” through December 31, 2022—over four years after he fled the United States without warning upon the arrest of Russian spy Maria Butina, with whom he had met on at least one occasion. Question: Given that Trump lender Evan Greenberg is currently on the nine-person Advisory Council for The Center for the National Interest, in which capacity he would have worked closely with Dimitri Simes as that organization’s CEO, when was the last time Greenberg and now-known Kremlin agent (and current Kremlin employee on Russian television) Simes had contact; what was the subject of their conversation(s); and how frequently has Mr. Greenberg been in contact with this internationally recognized mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin since Simes fled the U.S. under dubious circumstances six years ago?

(2) Trump lender Evan Greenberg’s dad Maurice also had contact with subsequently arrested, convicted, incarcerated, and deported Russian spy Maria Butina—as well as with her Kremlin handler, Alexander Torshin—but less well known is the fact, as reported by the Washington Post, that the aforementioned Kremlin agent Simes aided and abetted Butina’s activities by trying to set up meetings between the Kremlin spy and officials in the American government on Greenberg’s behalf and because of their joint association with the same Center for the National Interest that Trump lender Evan Greenberg co-leads. Question: What did Maurice Greenberg and/or his son know about these illicit efforts by their close CNI colleague Simes, and was Simes at the Greenberg-Butina meeting that the FBI and U.S. counterintelligence agencies already know about?

(3) As of 2019, the same Center for the National Interest that Trump lender Evan Greenberg now co-leads had spent over $1 million—according to a report by the Washington Post—to defend itself against serious suspicions from federal law enforcement that its domestic program inside the United States was part of pro-Trump, Kremlin-led election interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and indeed as of 2019 (in the midst of the first Trump-Biden electoral matchup) the Post reported that Trump lender Evan Greenberg’s CNI was “still dealing with a Senate Finance Committee investigation into [Greenberg associate] Simes’s contacts with Alexander Torshin, a top Russian Central Bank official, and his associate Marina Butina, who was sentenced last month to 18 months in prison for actions she took on behalf of Torshin and for ‘the benefit of the Russian Federation,’ in the words of federal prosecutors.” Question: Was Trump lender Evan Greenberg, or his father Maurice Greenberg, interviewed by the Department of Justice, the United States Senate, the United States House of Representatives, or any other federal investigative agency as part of the Trump-Russia investigation, and if so what were the questions the Greenbergs were asked by federal investigators?

(4) Trump lender Evan Greenberg worked for his father Maurice— a Vladimir Putin business associate and a Russian bank co-owner—for a quarter-century, leaving his father’s employ less than two and a half years before the company both Greenbergs had been working for for decades signed a lucrative consultancy with the Kremlin in early 2003. Question: Did Trump lender Evan Greenberg directly negotiate with the Kremlin on a long-term consultancy contract before leaving AIG in late 2000, and if so, what financial benefits did Greenberg receive from his work alongside the Kremlin and what precisely were the terms of Evan Greenberg’s employer’s proposal to aid the Kremlin internationally from 2003 onward?

(5) We know from a Bloomberg report that the longtime “Center for the National Interest” CEO Dimitri Simes’s name appears a staggering 134 times in DOJ’s 2019 report on alleged Trump-Russia collusion, and we know that Trump lender and CNI Advisory Council member Evan Greenberg’s father Maurice “Hank” Greenberg bought part of a Russian bank the very same year (2008) that Donald Trump Jr. bragged to potential Trump Organization investors at an event in New York City that the Trump Organization was doing booming business in Russia. Question: Did the Trump family receive loans from Greenberg’s Russian bank at any point between 2008 and 2014, the latter year one in which Trump’s second-eldest son, Eric Trump, told a sports reporter that the Trump Family got “all” the money it needed for some of its biggest investments and properties from “Russian banks”, and did either of the Greenbergs discuss with Donald Trump—as part of or an adjunct to any such lending that might have occurred—Trump’s plan to develop a pro-Russia foreign policy if elected President of the United States? And if such loans occurred, what collateral did Trump propose—or what argument did he make that he was a worthwhile investment for the Greenberg Family—at a time no American or European bank would loan to him?

(6) According to reporting by The Daily Beast, one of the men who would have been overseeing the elder Greenberg’s bank, Russian spymaster Alexander Torshin—a powerful Russian Central Bank official—sought direct aid from Greenberg just a few months after Greenberg’s Russian bank, which may or may not have been lending to the Trump family at the time, had to be dissolved in 2014 due to rampant illegal conduct; moreover, at the subsequent meeting at which Kremlin agent and banker Torshin sought aid from forcibly retired Russian-bank-co-owner Maurice Greenberg—which meeting was held at the Center for the National Interest that the elder Greenberg then ran and the younger Greenberg, Trump lender Evan Greenberg, was apparently then involved with—the subject of discussion was the Russia government’s finances in the wake of Barack Obama’s punishing sanctions on Russia for illegally invading Ukraine. Question: did Maurice Greenberg or Evan Greenberg ever discuss with Donald Trump how a change in U.S. policy toward Russia, specifically a dropping of Russian sanctions Trump promised immediately upon declaring his 2016 candidacy and that his national security adviser Michael Flynn thereafter illegally negotiated with Kremlin agent and spymaster Sergey Kislyak, could resolve Russia’s economic situation? And if so, how was this discussion linked to either the Greenberg Family’s financial and legal crisis in Moscow or the aid that a top Kremlin agent, Torshin, was then seeking one or both Greenbergs’ help with?

(7) Most people know that Russian spy Maria Butina wrote articles for the largely Greenberg Family-funded operation The National Interest—the publication of Trump lender Evan Greenberg’s Center for the National Interest—under the editorship and the direct supervision of the Greenbergs’ CNI associate, clandestine Kremlin agent and Trump adviser Dimitri Simes. Question: Did either of the Greenbergs participate directly or indirectly in CNI’s facilitation of the dissemination of Russian propaganda in the United States during the Kremlin’s illegal campaign to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 U.S. presidential election?

(8) As a Washington Post report confirms, Kremlin agent and Maurice Greenberg business associate Dimtri Simes has “acknowledged that he asked [Kremlin spymaster] Torshin to look into a problem the Center [for the National Interest]’s longtime former board chairman, [Maurice] Greenberg, was having with a large investment he made in a Russian bank.” Question: Did the elder Greenberg ever discuss with his son and longtime employee, proposed Trump lender and Center for the National Interest Advisory Council member Evan Greenberg, the fact that he was seeking aid from Kremlin agents to squelch an investigation into illegalities at his bank? And given the timing of this meeting between Greenberg and Russian spies—that is, just a few weeks before Donald Trump announced his historically pro-Kremlin candidacy for President of the United States—did Maurice Greenberg and Trump lender Evan Greenberg discuss, in advance of Trump’s big campaign announcement, how or why or when a Trump presidency (in 2016 or at any future date, such as 2024) could aid the Greenberg Family’s embattled overseas finances?

(9) Like many conservatives (for instance, Ginni Thomas, though in her case it was Ted Cruz) Maurice Greenberg initially supported someone besides Donald Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination—Jeb Bush—even as he occupied the CNI Advisory Board position his son/Trump lender Evan Greenberg now occupies and even though he was, per the Washington Post, the single largest donor to CNI in the years it was a covert arm of the 2016 Trump campaign. Question: when Maurice Greenberg finally cut his annual payments to CNI from seven figures to just $25,000 in 2019, was it because he was upset that the Kremlin agent running CNI, Dimitri Simes, had failed to protect him from (as Simes has described it) “[an] attack [on the Greenbergs] in Russia from corrupt forces” that Simes believed “[Kremlin spymaster Alexander Torshin’s] Central Bank” could end by “do[ing] the right thing”? Did either onetime Evan Greenberg associate and current Kremlin agent Simes, Evan Greenberg’s father Maurice, Maurice’s Kremlin contact Alexander Torshin, or any Kremlin agent or Russian banker known to the Greenberg Family ever discuss with proposed Trump lender Evan Greenberg the likelihood of Donald Trump—working in conjunction with the Kremlin—being able to destroy the “corrupt forces” in Russia that threatened and ultimately ruined Maurice Greenberg’s Russian business if Evan agreed to sign off on a $91.6 million bond for Trump that would keep him in the 2024 U.S. presidential race?

(10) We all know that offering a financial benefit for an official government action constitutes the federal felony of Bribery. Question: Given that Trump in 2020 made his longtime adviser and current proposed lender Evan Greenberg the only insurance executive listed among 200 business leaders named in the president’s Great American Economic Revival Industry Group, did Evan Greenberg discuss with Donald Trump, when he signed off on a $91.6 million bond for Trump at a time no other carrier in the world would do so, any economic benefit that he had received as a result (indirect or direct) of this official government action by Trump while he was still President of the United States? Did Trump seek to remind Mr. Greenberg of this government largesse while he was begging him for money that could save him from personal bankruptcy and thereby preserve his 2024 presidential candidacy?

Conclusion

Research into this breaking news story continues. Because Ms. Carroll and Attorney Kaplan only have until Monday morning to file an objection to Trump’s new bond proposal, Proof is attempting to release new information about that proposal on an expedited, ad hoc basis. Please stay tuned to Proof for any additional information that can be released about this investigation in the coming hours and days.

As this breaking news unfolds, readers and journalists alike must remember that Mr. Trump is now just sixteen days from another New York-court-mandated deadline to issue a bond proposal in service of a staggeringly large civil judgement against him.

But this time, the bond Trump will need to secure is 500% the size of the current one he just secured at the eleventh hour and under deeply questionable circumstances.

Will Trump attempt to return to the Chubb Limited money-well, making the questions asked by this current Proof investigation—and inexplicably not being asked by major media—as relevant two weeks from now as they are today? Will major media have the requisite institutional muscle memory to ask critical questions of such a prospective future bond proposal if (a) that proposal doesn’t comes from Chubb, but (b) it does bear all the indicia of Kremlin involvement that Proof is spooling out from Trump’s filings and the relevant historical context now but that major media is ignoring? In short, if media gets the Chubb Bond Proposal of March 11 wrong, will it also get the Chubb Bond Proposal of March 25 wrong?

The failure of major media to apprehend the dangers posed to American national security by the Chubb bond proposal are summarized by the image below, which is Page 437 of New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

That book, published five and half years ago, provided what was then (and is still) the most comprehensive assessment of 2015-to-2018 Trump collusion with Russia this side of the Mueller Report or congressional reports on the subject—and in fact even included a significant amount of fully sourced data not present in any federal report.

What you will notice in the image below is that Trump lender Evan Greenberg’s father Maurice Greenberg is listed as being discussed on multiple pages in Proof of Collusion—a rare “honor” given how factually dense a book Proof of Collusion is (as any reader of it will confirm).

The idea that the Greenberg Family has ties to the Kremlin that make them ineligible lenders for Trump in the context of a 2024 U.S. presidential election that the Kremlin is currently interfering with despite its protestations to the contrary is not a new one, in other words. It doesn’t hail from just this week, or just this year, or even this decade.

The Proof project you’re following now identified Maurice Greenberg as a potential problem for U.S. national security over half a decade ago—and the fact that much of major media missed the story then doesn’t somehow paper over its apparent failure (thus far) to remedy that mistake in the 2020s.

Should Trump and/or Evan Greenberg and/or a very large number of Chubb employees step forward to provide reliable evidence that Chubb’s CEO was, bizarrely, somehow not at all involved in the riskiest and most potentially reputation-damaging financial transaction in the history of that company, making it suddenly seem impossible that there could be anything untoward in a bond proposal Judge Kaplan clearly anticipated would be problematic in some way, it would nevertheless be useful for the media to have undertaken the exercise the Proof project is undertaking right now.

The list above of eighteen upcoming legal entanglements facing Donald Trump makes the case, and irreversibly, that massive major-media coverage of what is happening in New York in the Carroll case is warranted.

A criminal defendant who is facing 91 felony charges and personal bankruptcy; who is facing well over half a billion dollars in fines he cannot pay and a parade of trial and appellate proceedings in civil and criminal cases he can’t possibly win; and who has been deemed ineligible for loans by domestic and international lending establishments for over two decades, isn’t someone whose bizarre, eleventh-hour bond proposals can go without some draconian journalistic scrutiny. And that scrutiny must be mindful not just of the bond terms Chubb’s ink has reduced to writing but the context in which Trump is working to save himself from incarceration, financial ruin, and a permanent destruction of his legacy.

Anything less than the most aggressive investigative reporting on this potential threat to American national security is a betrayal of the journalistic principles Proof and all working journalists must hold dear.