The Trump Bond Crisis Is Over For Now, and Ended As It Began—with Trump Committing Fraud
The New York Attorney General’s Office, and Judge Arthur Engoron, may just have proven the opposite of what they intended: that a little Perjury, Bribery, Conspiracy, and Fraud can go a very long way.
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Introduction
The Trump Bond Crisis is over for now, and it ended exactly as it began—with Trump committing Fraud.
This brief recap of what happened in Donald Trump’s civil hearing in New York City today details how Judge Arthur Engoron, New York Attorney General Letitia James, the New York Attorney General’s Office, and certain major-media journalists made the decision—and it was a decision—to let themselves be conned by a man who had literally had been brought before them, in the first instance, on the premise that he’s a lifelong con man who will always seek to lie and cheat when facing accountability.
Which is exactly—and utterly predictably—what he did here. And no one involved in the grotesque display that unfolded today could’ve expected anything different ex ante.
It is beyond the scope of this publication to speculate on why American rule of law does not apply to Donald Trump. Proof cannot know what threats against people and institutions behind the scenes may have helped produce Trump’s win in court today, or what local or national political pressures may have been brought to bear to ensure that the State of New York wouldn’t be dismantling the real estate “empire” of the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential candidate as the 2024 general election unfolded.
Proof has no interest in speculating, as some do, about whether Trump has now been an informant for the FBI and CIA for so long that he’s become effectively untouchable, as while Trump is confirmed to have been an FBI collaborator in the past (and, of course, to also have lied about that well-documented fact) we have no information on whether this relationship has continued to the present day—beyond Trump associates apparently being behind the funding of an FBI informant now indicted for trying to help Trump steal the 2024 presidential election.
By the same token, the FBI being politically in the bag for Trump is clear, and has been since 2016—when it lied to the New York Times about whether Trump had any ties to Russia on the eve of the general election, after months of publicly dragging Hillary Clinton through the mud for non-criminal conduct—but the reasons for it remain opaque. Just so, the CIA never releasing even one independent audit of the national security threats posed by Trump’s dodgy foreign entanglements from the 1980s onward pretty clearly emphasized to anyone paying attention that that agency aimed to keep its nose clear of political repercussions for doing its job more so than keeping Americans safe.
In both cases, the simplest explanation for otherwise unconscionable conduct by those assigned the public’s trust may simply be that law enforcement—contra the story told by Trump and his associates, and credulously lapped up by Trump fans ignorant of the history of American law enforcement—is politically conservative by temperament, nature, and self-interest.
What we know is this: Donald Trump is the very definition of a stochastic terrorist.
He knows that when he publicly points at an enemy, whether that enemy is a person or a group or an institution, his cult-like fan base will spring into action with threats and worse against that person, group, or institution. Does Trump really want those who defy him to be assassinated? Does he want courthouses whose occupants have displeased him to be bombed? We don’t know and it doesn’t matter—and in any case, as a Trump biographer I can tell you that if Trump’s past is precedent, the most likely answer to these queries is that he really doesn’t think about or care what happens to his enemies as long as their ability to harm or even vaguely annoy him is neutralized.
Trump is generally indifferent to the plight of anyone but himself—or, at the outside, his daughter Ivanka, the only one of his children he has any respect for whatsoever—and that includes bombings and assassinations and any consequences of him putting a target on people and places.
So why did Trump’s prosecutor and judge fold like wet napkins in New York today?
We don’t know.
We just know that there have already been criminal convictions for individuals who did as Trump clearly wanted them to do and threatened to assassinate Judge Engoron and Attorney General James. We know that the threats against those Trump names online as his enemies are “unprecedented” in American history, according to Reuters.
So it’s certainly possible that many of those who wake up one day thinking that they’ll hold Trump’s feet to the fire go to bed the same night not even fully appreciating how or why they ended up doing any but. Unprecedented threats against your life have a way of achieving that (wholly intended) effect. By the same token, fully appreciating how Trump is conning America is, as I know from experience, a full-time job, so even those public servants who think they’re well-versed in the tricks Trump is at that very moment using against them probably aren’t unless they dedicated their professional lives to that question over the last decade. Which, again, most have not and cannot.
What is clear is this: what happened in the final stage of the Trump Bond Crisis is not what would’ve happened to any other litigant; legitimate concerns about the Knight Bond were only glancingly addressed in court today; and it’s almost certain that, instead of blaming public officials and journalists for not doing their jobs, many news readers will blame those journalists who did do their jobs by outlining why the bond at issue was legally and financially insufficient but who didn’t adequately predict the conduct of legal professionals and other public officials who are under unprecedented threat due to Donald Trump’s deliberate, systematic, unpenalized criminal conduct.
Sadly, the anticlimactic conclusion of the Trump Bond Crisis adds up to a series of extremely perverse professional incentives that disincline journalists to want to write about Donald Trump at all, and disinclines public officials to deal even-handedly with him rather than simply try to end their engagement(s) with him as quickly as possible.
Still, this after-action report—an autopsy of another failure to hold Trump to account—is both necessary and part of this author’s job as a working independent journalist.
The Trump Bond Crisis Bibliography
Proof has offered the most extensive coverage of the Trump Bond Crisis-cum-Trump Bond War of any media outlet in the United States.
The Bibliography below briefly summarizes the past coverage of this topic at Proof (in chronological order, with each Proof report’s visual “color code,” title, and permalink). Note that many of these reports are for Proof subscribers only; see the red button atop this report to gain instant access to all the reports listed below, which total hundreds of pages of fully sourced, professional-grade research.
The Trump Bond Crisis: 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)
The Trump Bond War: 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” (link)
#09 | ⬛️ | “Inside Trump’s Bond War” (link)
#10 | 🔲 | “Everything We Were Told About the $175 Million Bond Donald Trump Got Was a Lie” (link)
#11 | 🔳 | “The Top 25 Issues With Trump’s $175M Bond—All Listed Here—Do Not Include the Two New Ones That Have Arisen Just Hours Before a Hearing That Could Determine the Future of His Empire” (link)
How Trump Got Away with It (This Time)
Here are all the points in the Trump Bond Crisis—which eventually morphed into the Trump Bond War—at which he should have been arrested or otherwise penalized for new offenses rather than rewarded with the soggy capitulation we actually witnessed.
In a 2023 civil deposition, Trump committed Perjury on the matter of how much money he had free and clear to pay a civil judgment. Trump claimed, under oath, to have $400 million free and clear to pay a civil judgment, which testimony Judge Engoron decided to credit when he showed mercy to Trump and ordered him to pay an amount less than Trump had said he had available and chose not to issue the “corporate death penalty” against the Trump Organization (which penalty would have forbidden it from ever doing business in the State of New York again). Trump rewarded Judge Engoron for his mercy by (a) calling him corrupt so many times and so publicly that the judge has been under threat of assassination for half a year now; (b) pretending that there was no reasoning or meaning behind the fine set by the judge other than naked contempt for the Trump Family; (c) ignoring entirely the grace shown by the judge in not assessing the corporate death penalty in a case that richly warranted it; and (d) pretending that he’d never said that he had $400 million free and clear to pay a civil judgment and indeed instructing his attorneys to say the opposite to the judges reviewing Judge Engoron’s prior holdings without any acknowledgment that doing so meant these attorneys were committing a fraud on the court and that Trump himself had lied under oath in his 2023 depo and should be charged with a felony for doing so.
In March 2024, major media and the courts decided to give Trump a pass on the so-called Chubb Bond, despite that bond appearing from every angle as a bribe that threatened national security. The CEO who signed off on the Chubb Bond has significant business interests in both Russia and China that would be affected by future policy choices that could be made by President Trump in a hypothetical second Trump administration, as carefully documented by Proof in the reports linked to above. All three of (a) the extensive personal ties between the Trump Family and the Greenberg Family, (b) public promises made by Trump to benefit Russian and Chinese business interests over American ones (and/or American national security) if re-elected, and (c) repeated lies told by Chubb and Trump about the Chubb Bond indicate that all parties to it were aware of the political motivations behind it. Yet the FBI conducted no investigation of it; the CIA conducted no investigation of it; major media conducted no investigation of it; the litigant in the Carroll II case sought no investigation of it; the New York Attorney General’s Office did not investigate it; and the court asked no questions about it. The result certainly appears to be, for any who did investigate it, an event that has been commonplace during the Trump era: a transparent bribe by foreign interests, laundered through American actors, that never gets looked at because any institution that might do so fears it would get burned for having done so far more than the former president would (as both he and his party have made clear that they exact vengeance on any who—and any institution which—as per the old and in this case metaphorical adage, “comes for the King without killing him”).
In March 2024, Trump committed a fraud on the appellate courts of New York by not revealing that he had found a lender on his $454 million bond order. The lies told by Trump and his megadonor and “lender of last resort” Don Hankey about the Knignt Bond are virtually endless, to include literally every detail about how the two came into contact with one another about a bond deal in the first instance and whether in fact it had always been their plan to work together to ensure that Trump not only did not pay not a dime for his bond but made money on the deal (itself a sign of possible Bribery related, again, to future actions Trump might be in a position to take if he were to again occupy the White House). The most egregious lie in this fact-pattern was this one: after Hankey told Trump he would help him with his $454 million bond, Trump had his attorneys lie in an appellate briefing and claim that no such aid was available to him in order to convince the court—which he did successfully—to lower his bond from $454 million to $175 million, something that wouldn’t have been a possibility for Trump if he and his legal team had informed the appellate court that in fact Trump had already found a lender. With that lowered bond amount in hand, it was then possible for Trump and Hankey to craft a deal that would actually make Trump money and pass court review. But in fact the reality is probably far worse than this. If Trump and Hankey in fact planned on working together all along (as they have many times in the past), all of the filings by Trump showing his efforts to get a loan from banks he already knew wouldn’t lend to him were part of a very carefully orchestrated fraud whose conclusion Mr. Trump knew would be a dodgy bond deal with Hankey. That places the origin of this conspiracy far earlier than many suspected, though in retrospect this seems unsurprising given that Trump knew he would need a massive bond in this case as early as September 2023—yet seemed to have spent the intervening months between then and Spring of 2024 doing nothing to prepare for such an eventuality. In fact, he may have been more active than was previously realized.
In April 2024, Trump committed a fraud on his civil trial court in New York by dissembling about every component of the Knight Bond. Trump tried to hide that his bond deal had an inexplicable “two days’ notice” provision that would allow Trump to drain the Charles Schwab account he had allegedly put up as collateral with Knight before Knight could access its funds. Trump hid—and did so successfully, even up to the present moment—that the account in question is already encumbered, inasmuch as Don Hankey’s Axos Bank has a prior perfected security interest in it that effectively reduces its value from $175 million to just $75 million, meaning that the Knight Bond is inadequately collateralized. Trump hid the fact that his melodramatic agreement to “sign over” the account to Knight on April 22, 2024 was meaningless because Trump is in a long-term financial relationship with the Hankey Group already, which means Hankey can easily transmit to Trump any interest earned on the Schwab account through other loan accounts it already has with Trump even as the account is purportedly in Hankey’s hands. Hankey can also forgive his prior perfected $100 million interest in that Schwab account without anyone being the wiser—but in a way that effectively sends more than half of the bond amount back to Trump—and Hankey can allow other parties in the Trump Family access to the account to taken action on it on Trump’s behalf (including current Hankey Group borrowers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner).
In April 2024, the New York Attorney General’s Office allowed the Hankey Group to violate New York law simply to let Trump off the hook on his bond. Knight Specialty Insurance Company is not meeting New York’s “10%-at-risk” insurance regulation, because it was electively and unilaterally waived for Trump’s lender without that lender even asking for such license (and indeed at a time when that lender was excoriating the New York Attorney General’s Office in every conceivable way in court). Knight is not authorized to operate in New York state; has no recent history of offering surety bonds to anyone (despite its owner falsely claiming to the court that he had offered Trump a bond in the same way he would anyone else, not because Trump could later do him favors as president); uses Cayman Islands-based creative accounting practices to hide its true (low) level of capitalization, and has never been investigated by the State of New York to determine if these practices are legal under New York law; still has not provided the State of New York sufficient information about (a) the amount Trump paid for his bond, (b) how much money is really in the Schwab account, (c) whether any other parties still have access to that account, or (d) whether any prior perfected encumbrances on that account would turn Trump into an illicit “double-dipper” as to his bond collateralization, and yet the New York Attorney General has inexplicably decided that none of this matters under circumstances in which it would not have made the same judgment(s) as to any other litigant.
These are just five failures of media and government that we saw in the Trump Bond Crisis-cum-Trump Bond War. I would direct readers to the eleven exhaustive reports on this scandal in the Bibliography above for many more of them. In short, Proof can find no evidence that any part of the Trump Bond Crisis was conducted by any party in a manner in any way consistent with the fair and impartial administration of justice.
Conclusion
We know Trump is being treated differently from any other litigant in New York and is being given a pass by major media in a way it would never give any poor, nonwhite person caught up in the civil or criminal justice systems of the United States. So why?
Proof, again, cannot speculate. But it is more inclined toward Occam’s Razor than to any eldritch, unprovable conspiracy theory now making the rounds on the interwebs.
Donald Trump is threatening his judges and prosecutors in a way no one else has, does, or can.
Trump, as a former and possibly future POTUS, can exact vengeance no one else can.
Trump has resources given to him by fans and PACs at a level no one has seen before.
Trump has a level of support in law enforcement that no other litigant has ever had.
Trump lies, cheats, and steals in court more than any litigant we’ve ever witnessed.
Trump’s fraudulent accounting practices have defied legal scrutiny for decades now.
Trump’s political enemies—contra his claims—bend over backwards to not be seen as persecuting him, to the point that they treat him better than anyone else in the system.
Occam’s Razor would invite us to see these six novelties as the most likely bases for the unprecedented special treatment of Trump by our legal system and its officers, as when something novel is happening Occam’s Razor asks us to seek the simplest explanation—and the simplest explanation for a novel result is that a series of novel causes are undergirding it. Thus a court result that news readers can fault independent journalists for not predicting in advance if they wish, though it’s only journalists’ duty to (at a minimum) relay what’s happening and (at most) what should happen based on precedent, not to articulate the ways in which unprecedented inputs are likely to lead to unprecedented outputs.
Though it goes beyond the boundaries of this author’s journalistic duty to do so, he’ll say that major media should be ashamed of itself; that the prosecutors and judges in Trump’s cases should be ashamed of themselves; and that any news reader who gives Trump a pass based on what does happen rather than what should happen should also feel shame for having done so.
If America ends in 2025—in reality if not in name—we will have richly deserved it.
A man who is literally in court for fraud has now committed more fraud to avoid any real repercussions for his prior frauds, and has even gone so far as to use an account he is now on criminal trial for misusing to commit this new fraud. No one anywhere can say, on these facts, that Trump is some Harry Houdini cleverly hiding his tricks. He is, rather, a stochastic terrorist and lifelong con man who successfully preys on the many weaknesses of his marks—weaknesses ranging from incompetence to cowardice, from ignorance to laziness, from political self-interestedness to moral vacuity—to win. This is what America is in 2024: an easy mark for a third-rate con man. If it collapses next year, we will not have to look any farther than this for an adequate explanation for it.
Thanks once more for speaking out. I wish others had your courage. No doubt you receive plenty of threats from the MAGA cult. Stay safe and keep up the good work.
Golly. You are the most articulate detailed reporter we have that can zoom out and zoom in to the minutest detail. Thank you and don’t stop your incredibly difficult, painstaking and time consuming work. You are appreciated.