The Story of How Donald Trump Secured His Eleventh-Hour $175 Million Bond Is Already Changing Dramatically—Probably Because None of It Appears to Be True
A bond rescue that already looked dodgy from several angles now appears even more scandalous as the witness at the center of the event begins changing his story hours after the transaction occurred.
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Introduction
As a former federal criminal investigator, I know that it’s not always a sign of deceit when a witness’s story changes over time. Memories fade, and investigations often—due to unforeseeable circumstances—can’t commence until just long enough after an incident has occurred that by the time witnesses are reached for comment they have already begun remembering things differently than they would have at the time of the incident or immediately thereafter. The result of this natural degradation of memory is that investigators often find witnesses saying one thing to people on-scene during an event and quite another to professional investigators days or weeks later.
None of this applies, however, when a witness is being asked about a situation that just occurred within the last 24 to 48 hours. Assuming the witness isn’t experiencing undue duress or in the midst of an exciting circumstance—one that makes impossible for them to accurately and calmly recount what they’ve seen or heard—at the time they’re being questioned, there’s no particular reason for a witness of this sort to be changing their narrative with respect to an important event so soon after it occurred.
All of which explains why it is so odd, and candidly so concerning, that the key figure in this stage of the Trump Bond Crisis—Knight Specialty Insurance Company CEO Don Hankey—is already changing his version of events at to how he came to rescue the 2024 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States from financial ruin at the eleventh hour.
This story should not be changing—particularly not with respect to the central event in the story, that being the phone calls between Hankey and Team Trump—but it is.
Investigators are trained to recognize and discard the initial replies most investigators receive amidst hotly contested events, which responses are all some variation of the following three: “I don’t know him”; “I’ve never spoken to him” (and/or “I’ve never spoken to him about that”); and “I didn’t know that that happened.” These witness narratives must always be the beginning, not the ending, of any serious investigation, the reason being that they are exceptionally easy to give—and are rarely the full truth.
With this in mind, here’s the Trump Bond Crisis probe as it’s unfolded at Proof so far:
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” (link)
#08 | 🟫 | “The Story of How Donald Trump Secured His Eleventh-Hour $175 Million Bond Is Already Changing Dramatically—Probably Because None of It Appears to Be True”
Unfortunately, it seems that corporate media in 2024 often lacks the will or resources to push through the initial response investigators expect to receive from witnesses, so when major-media journalists received some variation of all of these from the two central witnesses in the current stage of the Trump Bond Crisis—Hankey and Greg Garrabrants, two fabulously wealthy, well-connected, and savvy political operators who combined have conceived of ways to lend the Trump Family well over a billion dollars—there was an unusual willingness amongst these professionals to immediately report out the Hankey-Garrabrants line, no matter how facially preposterous it was.
And here’s that line, in brief:
Both men say that they’ve never met or even spoken to Donald Trump—by any means or for any purpose—though Trump is the man they both vote for every election and have lavishly supported financially (as a politician and a borrower);
Hankey says that he didn’t even know one of his companies (Axos Financial) was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump, even as Garrabrants says he was so familiar with Trump’s property empire while lending him hundreds of millions via Axos that—despite never having met or spoken to the man he was lending to—he didn’t need the usual information about Trump any lender would need from a borrower, didn’t need to do a walk-through of Trump National Doral before rescuing it from ruin because he was familiar enough with it already to become involved with it immediately upon request, and has only been in Trump Tower a single time for a walkthrough, during which walkthrough he only saw Eric Trump and never met his father (whose primary residence at the time was in the building Garrabrants was then in, and who was at the time seeking hundreds of millions from Garrabrant, despite allegedly never deigning to meet him); and
to the extent that these two men have been termed “the lender[s] of last resort to the Trumps” by Rolling Stone, this fact is nevertheless more or less news to them because (a) Garrabrants has never met or spoken to Jared Kushner despite being involved with his businesses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and Kushner, for his part, says he neither knows nor has met Garrabrants or even was aware Garrabrants had rescuing him financially until after it happened), and (b) Hankey only reached out to Donald Trump to save him from financial and political ruin because “he would have done the same for anyone.”
These are the facially unserious, impossible-to-credit tales of ignorance, aloofness, and lily-white naïveté now being sold to major media by one of the richest men in the United States (Hankey, net worth $7.4 billion) and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the United States (Garrabrants, annual salary last reported at around $34.5 million). Really?
No investigator would accept these responses as honest—indeed, upon receiving them would treat them as signs of “consciousness of guilt”—but with American media in this decade, these self-exculpations are treated as satisfactory even as no one seems to believes a poor and/or nonwhite man arrested for a street crime about anything he says.
America exhibits an excess of credulousness where the rich are concerned—notably, with rich white businessmen in particular—even though that credulousness has now delivered unto the country the years and years of stark moral degradation historians will eventually term the Era of Trumpism.
This has to stop, and now is as good a time as any. One way to stop it in the present news cycle is to frankly acknowledge that what Hankey and Garrabrants are telling journalists is an insult to the professionalism of those journalists and the intelligence of American news consumers. And again, I say this not as a partisan but as someone who as a criminal justice professional worked in the criminal justice system long-term.
It’s with all the foregoing in mind that this report analyzes the shifting narratives Hankey and Garrabrants have provided to U.S. media in just the first 48 hours after Trump’s latest bond rescue.
An Already Nonsensical Narrative Goes Off the Rails
