MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: New Evidence Suggests That Trump’s $175 Million Bond May Be Every Bit As Dodgy As Every U.S. National Security Expert Feared
Trump biographers—including this author—told readers it was unlikely Trump had $175 million in cash as he said, and might seek aid from abroad. This exhaustive report adds to that startling scenario.
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Introduction
{Note: Links to the six prior Proof reports on the Trump Bond Crisis, which are helpful but not mandatory prefaces to this report, can be found in the mid-Introduction “bibliography,” below.}
When Donald Trump secured the first of two seemingly unattainable supersedeas (i.e., appellate) bonds on March 8, 2024—a $91.63 million bond stemming from the second of two civil suits relating to his Sexual Abuse and Defamation of journalist E. Jean Carroll—he did so at the eleventh hour. Despite having had six months since his loss in what’s now known as the Carroll II civil trial, by the evening March 7, 2024, Trump was no closer to getting his nearly $100 million bond than he had been in fall of 2023.
Nor was this much of a surprise. A $91.63 million bond is, after all, staggering in size, and insurance carriers who might have considered lending to Trump knew that not only did he have a history of not paying his loans; not only did he almost always under-pay his loans when they were paid; not only did he sometimes seek to financially ruin any person or institution that had loaned him money and then had the temerity to ask for it back; he also was just weeks away from having to secure a bond five times larger than the Carroll II bond—a $454 million bond—and, not for nothing, was (and still is) facing 88 state and federal felonies in four U.S. jurisdictions with a real possibility of significant prison time ahead.
In this context, it was no surprise that Trump couldn’t secure a $91.63 million bond.
Even his son Eric Trump, as ever trying to be helpful and failing, would just days after his father’s March 11 bond deadline—as his father was begging another New York court to lower his second bond to something he had a chance of affording—go on TV to note that most bond companies won’t even touch a bond of $100 million (which Trump’s Carroll II bond had certainly approached) and underscored that even though New York Judge Arthur Engoron had said that Trump could use multiple lenders to secure his $454 million bond, no lenders were willing to participate in such a scheme—seemingly confirming that even the bond of $91.63 million that Trump had needed for Carroll II had been almost an impossibility for him.
As Proof thereafter found through the six full-length reports below, Trump appears to have secured his $91.63 million bond—again, at the eleventh hour—in part because the CEO of Chubb Limited, Evan Greenberg, felt that backing Trump despite every extant business indicator warning against it could end up being good for Chubb’s sprawling business interests in China (an implicit acknowledgment that, as national security experts have long feared, Mr. Trump’s rolling “bond crisis” is also a national security crisis as well; anyone who now aids Trump financially, against the backdrop of there being no legitimate business basis to do so, is almost certainly seeking to purchase future U.S. domestic policy or—an even more terrifying. but also even more likely prospect—future U.S. foreign policy).
Bibliography: Every Proof Report on the Ongoing Trump Bond Crisis
(in chronological order, with each Proof report’s visual “color code,” title, and permalink)
On the March 11, 2024 Bond
#01 | 🟥 | “Source of the Money for $91 Million Bond in Trump’s Defamation and Rape Case Appears to Have Major Kremlin Ties” (link)
#02 | 🟦 | “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” (link)
#03 | 🟩 | “Experts Said for Weeks That Trump Might Get Bonded By Kremlin Allies. Now It’s Happening—Causing a National Security Crisis—So Why Is Media So Silent About the Greenberg Family?” (link)
#04 | 🟨 | “Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, Greenberg, Yass, TikTok—Dozens of Far-Flung Narratives Are Suddenly Coming Together As Trump Seeks a New Surety Bond to Avoid Ruin” (link)
#05 | 🟧 | “Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s Impending Financial Ruin As a Hard $454 Million Bond Deadline Arrives Monday” (link)
#06 | ⬜️ | “It Sure Looks Like the Chinese Communist Party Is Trying to Bail Out Donald Trump in Advance of His Monday Bond Deadline” (link)
On the April 1, 2024 Bond
#07 | 🟪 | “New Evidence Suggests That Donald Trump’s $175 Million Bond May Be Every Bit As Dodgy As Almost Every U.S. National Security Expert Feared”
For all the foregoing reasons, the views of bestselling Trump biographers—a group of which this author is a proud member—dovetailed, in the lead-up to Trump’s second bond deadline, inasmuch as those available to the general public were all of a piece:
We agreed that Trump didn’t have anywhere near $454 million in liquid assets, despite having said under oath in a 2022 deposition that he had $400 million free and clear to pay any future civil judgment(s) (a claim he repeated last week); and
we agreed that even at a much lower bond level, Trump would likely find it hard or even impossible to scrape together sufficient liquid assets to pay any sizable supersedeas bond.
For these reasons, when a New York appeals court shocked the U.S. legal community by announcing, without explanation, that Trump’s bond would be reduced from $454 million to $175 million—an implicit finding that Trump was probably “good for” the full amount in the event of the standing $454 million civil judgment against him being upheld, a particularly odd holding given its backdrop of Trump having no history of encountering any sizable debt he has been willing to pay in its entirety without years and years of frivolous litigation beforehand—it may have caused many in major media to presume that Trump would now easily be able to make his bond.
But it did not have the same salutary effect on the thinking of Trump biographers.
We continued to doubt whether Trump could make even a $175 million bond. After all, if he’d only secured a $91.63 million bond in early March at the eleventh hour and under dubious circumstances (see the Proof reports above), why should he find himself suddenly able to make a bond nearly twice as large later on in March, indeed at a time his financial condition was even worse than it had been three weeks earlier (due to the $91.63 million bond he’d just posted)?
With all this in mind, there were understandable online murmurs Sunday night when Trump—given ten days to secure his now-$175 million bond (an amount that he told America he could easily pay and would pay in “cash”)—still hadn’t paid the bond a full week after a court order that should have both overjoyed him and sent him straight to his banker(s). What was the holdup, onlookers wondered? Could it be that, as Trump’s biographers had been insisting, even his new $175 million bond was a stretch for him?
Could it be that if only one lender had been willing to touch a $91.63 million bond on March 8, it would stand to reason that no one would be willing to touch a second bond for $175 million just three weeks later? (Put this way, it almost seems a self-evident point.)
So when Bloomberg broke the news, late Monday night, that Trump had just made his $175 million bond with 48 hours to spare on his ten-day deadline, something seemed off. Very off. It was enough to send this author and other longtime Trump researchers into some hardcore open-source research. In fairly short order, that research here at Proof produced a viral post on Twitter—the first to reveal that Trump’s newest lender, Don Hankey, at least appears to be considerably shadier than Evan Greenberg ever was.
In short, there’s every reason to think that Donald Trump may not have been the source for all of the cash collateral put up for his new bond, and late-breaking news from insurance analysts—discussed in detail below—goes even further than this to conclude that Trump’s new bond may not even be legally valid at all, in which case we can expect it to shortly be challenged in court by the New York Attorney General’s Office and the New York Attorney General, Letitia James.
In this view, Trump’s just-announced Knight Specialty Insurance Company bond is merely a smokescreen to buy Trump more time to secure a legitimate bond—a bond it does now appear he legitimately can’t afford, his sworn deposition in 2022 and public assurances to American voters to the contrary notwithstanding.
This is the story behind the strangest bond saga in the history of the United States—one that stands in full view of the American people as a major national security crisis.