Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts may backfire in court amid the his ongoing legal cases, according to attorney and legal analyst Joyce Vance on Sunday.
Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was fined $355 million after being found liable in a civil fraud trial brought against him and The Trump Organization by New York Attorney General Letitia James, which accused him of fraudulently overvaluing assets to secure more favorable bank loans. With interest, the penalty is now over $450 million, and James has begun the process to allow the seizure of Trump’s real estate assets if he’s unable to pay or post an appeal bond before Monday.
Although Trump can appeal the ruling against him without a bond or paying the cash, the former president would be required to post a bond of slightly more than the amount of the penalty against him to stop the collection of his assets. In a court filing from last week, Trump’s legal team admitted that he has been unable to secure the bond amount after asking dozens of surety entities, which all turned him down due to the size of the bond. The filing called the possibility of posting the amount in time a “practical impossibility.”
However, in a post to Truth Social on Friday morning, Trump claimed to have $500 million in cash available to him, contradicting the statements from his lawyers.
“Through hard work, talent, and luck, I currently have almost five hundred million dollars in cash, a substantial amount of which I intended to use in my campaign for president,” Trump wrote in the post. “The often overturned political hack judge on the rigged and corrupt A.G. case, where I have done nothing wrong, knew this, wanted to take it away from me, and that’s where and why he came up with the shocking number which, coupled with his crazy interest demand, is approximately $454,000,000.”
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In a Sunday interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama who was nominated by then-President Barack Obama, noted Trump’s Truth Social post, adding that his posts may backfire if the judges take a look at them and decide to deny Trump “forgiveness of the full amount of the bond.”
“Imagine being one of his lawyers and saying one thing in your court papers and having your client undercut you publicly the next day on Truth Social. The judges are certainly entitled to take a look at Trump’s posts in this vein and it would be fair to deny him any sort of measures for forgiveness of the full amount of the bond in the form of the surety bond he has asked for simply because he says he can afford it and he chooses not to,” she said.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s spokesperson and his legal team via email for comment.
Vance also said on Sunday that the judges should hold the former president accountable for his words.
“I think we have reached a point with Trump where judges should hold him accountable for his words rather than letting him get away with having it one way in court and one way in public. We are past the point in time where the courts can afford to let that happen,” she added.
Trump has until March 25 to come up with a bond amount or James could begin seizing some of his assets and properties.
Besides Trump’s properties in New York, the former president has his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. He also has a plethora of golf courses across the United States and even two in Scotland—Aberdeen and Turnberry—and one in Doonbeg, Ireland.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.