Last week, I wrote a story about the company which issued the bond to cover Trump’s ass if he can’t come up with the dough to pay the $464 million he owes New York State for committing bank fraud, a number which keeps increasing every day btw, and I said that his bonding company is another sleaze outfit which may not even be able to operate in New York State.
So today, my eagle-eyed sister sends me a link to another story in Daily Beast which claims, with plenty of backup data, that Trump’s bonding company may not be allowed to post the bonds for Trump because: a) the company isn’t registered to do business in New York State, and b) if they did get registered they don’t seem to have the necessary cash to bail Trump out.
But meanwhile, if you read the really fine print of the bonding agreement, you discover that Trump is still on the hook for the money if he loses his appeal.
So, we have a rather interesting situation here because either Trump knows that this bonding company can’t really help him cover his financial ass, or maybe he doesn’t know that from the bonding company’s point of view, the fix, so to speak, is still in.
Is there a chance that Trump, the master of sleaze, has gotten out-sleazed in this case? Your goddamn right there is, because the one thing which is becoming somewhat obvious about Trump’s legal and financial doings this year is that it doesn’t look like anyone’s really minding the store.
From 1997 until 2007, I worked for the country’s second largest mutual life insurance company, MassMutual, and my responsibility was to make sure that the software updates we sent out to the company’s salesforce every month met the regulations imposed on insurance products by every, single, fucking state.
Insurance is without a doubt the most heavily regulated industry, even more regulated than the stock market or the banks. Every state has its own insurance regulator, every state has different rules, every state requires that anyone selling any kind of insurance product meets every, single goddamn rule and the rules change all the time.
So, what does Trump do in order to post a bond in the New York bank fraud case? He not only makes a deal with an insurance outfit which is known in the industry for selling products like predatory car loans that stink of sleaze but happens to be a company which isn’t even registered to do business in New York State.
Maybe Trump knew all this, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t find any legitimate company to post this bond because no legitimate company wants to do business with someone facing endless felony charges all over the place.
But maybe what really happened here was that this company approached Trump rather than the other way around, because the owner of the company happens to be a big GOP donor and that’s what playing in the mega-donor league is really all about.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Trump didn’t know that the company posting his bond had no legal basis for operating in the state where the bond had to be sent because Trump not only has a long history of negating the value of expertise held by anyone other than himself, but at the moment, the guy who would have been taking care of this problem, his accountant Allan Weisselberg, is permanently banned from doing any kind of financial work in New York.
I suspect that ultimately, Trump will find some way to wiggle out of an immediate loss of his New York properties to satisfy Judge Engeron’s ruling covering liability in this case.
Just as well because imagine how boring it would be if we didn’t have Trump to kick around every day.