Less than a month after New York Attorney General Letitia James said she would be willing to seize former Republican President Donald Trump’s assets if he is unable to pay the $464 million required by last month’s judgment in his civil fraud case, Trump’s lawyers disclosed in court filings Monday that he had failed to secure a bond for the amount.
In the nearly 5,000-page filing, lawyers for Trump said it has proven a “practical impossibility” for Trump to secure a bond from any financial institutions in the state, as “about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets including real estate as collateral and have demanded cash and other liquid assets instead.
To get the institutions to agree to cover that $464 million judgment if Trump loses his appeal and fails to pay the state, he would have to pledge more than $550 million as collateral—“a sum he simply does not have,” reportedThe New York Times, despite his frequent boasting of his wealth and business prowess.
It was foggy’s job to support his argument, not mine. He should’ve done a better job (e.g. by citing the video you found instead of the manual one he picked).
Also, I wrote that it would take “hours” to scan in 5000 pages, even with a fast scanner. The scanner you cited can do 3000 pph, so it would take 1.6 “hours” to scan 5000 pages. That’s still a plural number of hours, so if that’s the fastest scanner in the world my statement remains technically correct (the best kind of correct 🤓).
Finally, even a sheet-feed* very fast automatic document scanner (especially one hooked to an LLM in an automated workflow) sounds like a pretty expensive and specialized bit of tech, and I don’t know that we can assume the law firm would’ve chosen to make that investment instead of paying clerks a bunch of man-hours to do it the old, slow way.
(* Frankly, citing a book scanner instead of a sheet-feed one is another way foggy didn’t do his argument any favors, since I would’ve been happy to concede that the documents Trump’s lawyers produced were unlikely to have been bound in book form. And even if they were bound for some reason, they weren’t the kind of thing anybody would have qualms against running through a band saw to get rid of the spine.)