Prosecutors in Trump’s #criminal trial say he has violated a #GagOrder barring him from attacking #witnesses, #jurors & others close to the case. Testimony is set to resume later Tuesday morning.
#Trump's history of tipping off #tabloids about his life was a known fact well before TheApprentice.
"He was very cautious & very frugal, #Pecker said of Trump's approach to #money.
Testimony from Pecker that establishes Trump's track record of keeping a close eye on his #finances - “almost a micromanager," Pecker said - will help prosecution prove that Trump falsified #HushMoney records to cover up a sex scandal to influence the 2016 election.
"Trump is going to trial on April 15 for violating campaign finance laws, he’s a convicted rapist, the majority of the money he’s raising for his campaign is going to pay his legal bills, and he has been reduced to selling gaudy gold sneakers and specialty bibles to try and offset the hundreds of millions of dollars he is facing in potential court judgments."
"And yet somehow - somehow - the polls are asking us to believe that President Biden is the one in real trouble. I just kinda have a problem with that. Because if it’s true? Biden’s not the one in trouble.
Noting that Trump has been unable to get a bond for the $454 million plus he owes after being found guilty of fraud, Heather Cox Richardson says,
"Last year, Trump said under oath that he had 'substantially in excess of 400 million in cash,' and that amount was 'going up very substantially every month.'”
"Apparently, that statement was a lie, or the money has evaporated, or Trump doesn’t want to use it to pay this court-ordered judgment on top of the $91.6 million bond he posted earlier this month in the second E. Jean Carroll case.
Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg notes that Trump’s desperate need for cash makes him even more of a national security threat than his retention of classified documents made it clear he already was."
Brian Beutler says that Trump's desperation for money "alone is enough to conflict Trump out of receiving the classified intelligence briefings the government typically provides to presidential nominees as a courtesy. It’s one of many conflicts, in fact. But then Trump decided to drive the point home even further.
On Monday, we learned Trump wants to bring Paul Manafort back into his campaign."
"With Trump under financial pressure and angling to avoid jail, the possible reemergence of Russia-oligarch-whisperer Paul Manafort – himself convicted in the Mueller probe and later pardoned by Trump – as an adviser to the Trump campaign is a development that I would find implausible in a fictional political thriller, but here we are."
The danger posed to #Trump’s #finances by 2 recent judgments against him has been, if anything, underappreciated. The size of the awards, the structure of his business empire, & the condition of the #RealEstate#market combine to create a truly perilous moment for #TrumpOrganization &, by extension, for Trump’s personal finances.
Even b4 the formal finding that many of the #TrumpOrganization’s #property valuations were fabricated, pinning down anything definitive about the firm’s #finances has always been challenging. Bc it is a privately held company, much info about it is secret. #Trump’s name has always been synonymous w/(to be charitable) puffery & hyperbole. Independent assessments place his networth in the billions, but as he suggested in the depo, that’s largely in real property or in hazy estimates of brandvalue.
Such existing #loans likely include covenants that prevent owners from subordinating them to other liens—which would effectively reduce how much #Trump can use the properties as collateral, says Jim Wheaton, a #law prof at William&Mary who has studied Trump’s #finances. In simple terms, if a building is worth $50M, & $30M of that is subject to another #loan, the covenant means the other $20M isn’t free & clear to use as #collateral.