Idiot Trump Confesses He Actually Has the Money to Post Bond

After having reached out to several guarantors and 30 suretors for help posting his $464 million New York bank fraud bond, Donald Trump suddenly wants everyone to know he actually does have the cash.

In a bizarre rant on Friday morning, the man who was found to have defrauded banks and investors by overvaluing himself and the value of his properties claimed that he had accrued the wealth by way of “HARD WORK, TALENT, AND LUCK.”

Trump also admitted he has nearly half a billion dollars in cash.

The confession directly contradicts a filing from his legal team last month arguing that it would be “impossible” to secure a bond covering the full amount of the multimillion-dollar ruling.

Trump’s words will surely help out New York Attorney General Letitia James, who on Wednesday urged an appeals court to ignore Donald Trump’s latest effort to worm his way out of paying the $464 million disgorgement from his bank fraud trial.

The former president has until Monday to pay off the half-billion-dollar disgorgement—and if he doesn’t, James can begin taking steps to seize his assets to cover the debt, including 40 Wall Street and Trump Tower.

But Trump is juggling more than the fine deadline. Paying out of pocket could potentially put a major Wall Street deal on the line for the former president, as well. On Friday, investors in Truth Social are expected to sign off on a deal that would allow the company to go public, potentially offering a gigantic financial windfall for the GOP presidential pick. In a public version of the company, which would begin trading in just a few weeks, Trump would own at least 58 percent of the shares—a stake valued at $3 billion, reported Politico.

It would, however, trip him up in the short term. In order to begin the process, Trump would need to tie up his shares of the company in a lock-up agreement for the next six months, and any potential off-loading by the former president could be seen as cataclysmic to a deal that rides on his involvement.

With just a day left in Congress, retiring Representative Ken Buck has delivered a parting gift—that looks more like a parting shot—to his fellow Republicans.

Buck signed House Democrats’ foreign aid discharge petition Thursday night, the first Republican to do so. If the petition, which was launched earlier this month, reaches 218 signatures, it would force a vote on a $95 billion foreign aid package. The package, which has already passed the Senate, includes $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, an increasingly unpopular issue among far-right Republicans.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to consider the aid package, which would also give aid to Israel and Taiwan, despite it passing the Senate with broad bipartisan support, because it does not include regulations for the U.S.-Mexico border that he considers strict enough. But if the aid bill makes it to the House floor, it is expected to pass, again with bipartisan backing.

As of Thursday night, the discharge petition had 188 signatures. It needs just 30 more to pass.

Buck also signed a competing discharge petition to force a vote on a package that includes both Ukraine aid and new border restrictions. Other Republicans have also signed on to that petition, which has only 16 signatures so far.

Although Friday is Buck’s last day in Congress, his signatures will remain on both petitions until his temporary successor is chosen in a special election. If the successor also signs either petition, Buck’s name will be removed. The special election to replace Buck won’t be held until June, coinciding with the Colorado primaries.

Despite sitting on the far-right wing of his party, Buck has found himself at odds with his fellow Republicans in recent years. In fact, the far-right House Freedom Caucus voted Tuesday night to oust Buck from its ranks. One member, speaking anonymously, told The Hill that Buck hadn’t attended caucus meetings regularly for months.

The member cited Buck breaking with Republicans on “several major issues” and “leaving the conference hanging with a historically narrow margin” as the main reasons for his removal.

When Buck first announced his retirement in November, he slammed the GOP for pushing “self-serving lies,” including that the 2020 election had been stolen. More recently, he has been seemingly the only Republican who refused to fall in line with his party’s efforts to impeach Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Buck has repeatedly pointed out that neither impeachment effort is based on any evidence of wrongdoing.

Last week, when Buck announced he would retire early, he told CNN that the past year had been the “worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress.”

“Instead of having decorum, instead of operating in a professional manner, this place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” he said.

The government is about to just barely avoid a shutdown (again), and the House Freedom Caucus is livid about it.

Congress has until midnight Friday to approve funding for multiple key government agencies. Leaders from both parties presented a $1.2 trillion spending package early Thursday morning that is expected to pass, just managing to keep the government funded for the rest of the year.

The Freedom Caucus, which comprises the farthest-right lawmakers in the House, is furious over the bill and particularly with House Speaker Mike Johnson. The caucus views both failing to slash government spending and collaborating with Democrats as cardinal sins.

Freedom Caucus members took to social media to blast the spending bill, which they dubbed the “Swamp Omnibus.” Their gripes included the fact that the bill would fund the World Health Organization, fund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the Department of Defense, and provide military aid for Ukraine.

The caucus then announced it will hold a press conference Friday morning to discuss the bill and the fact that it was not given sufficient time to read the full text. In a statement, the caucus lambasted the fact that the bill “spends $5.5 Million per word, fully funds and continues the Biden border crisis, and it is loaded with radioactive ‘woke’ earmarks.”

House Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the chamber, meaning that Democrats and less extreme Republicans would have to unite behind the spending bill. Otherwise, just a few votes of opposition from the Freedom Caucus could tank the measure.

The House also still has the motion to vacate, the rule that allows just one member of the body to force a vote on whether to remove the speaker. It was this rule that resulted in former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ignominious ouster in October, thanks to several Freedom Caucus members. The caucus could invoke the rule again against Johnson. Far-right Republicans have been mulling the idea since January, accusing Johnson of making too many compromises with Democrats.

Michigan lawyer Stefanie Lambert unsuccessfully tried to challenge the 2020 election results in court. Now she’s appearing before a judge in another capacity.

Lambert turned herself in at a Michigan courthouse on Thursday, following another arrest earlier in the week, over a plot to seize several voting machines in the state in 2020.

Lambert was arrested on Monday in Washington, D.C., where she was representing election denier Patrick Byrne in a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Federal marshals arrested her in the courtroom for her failure to show up for a hearing in her home state. She’s accused of four felonies related to alleged tampering with voting machines in search of evidence of nonexistent vote manipulation during the 2020 election.

The goose chase began on March 7, when a warrant was issued for Lambert’s arrest for her role in what Michigan state Attorney General Dana Nessel called “a coordinated plan to gain access to voting tabulators.” Lambert, accused of breaking into voting machines to run “tests,” never showed. Then, on March 18, Lambert was arrested after  representing Byrne in the Dominion defamation suit, where she is also accused of leaking confidential internal emails belonging to Dominion. Lambert, who was given access to the emails as Byrne’s counsel, accused Dominion of “[instituting] fraud with this defamation suit” and leaked the emails to a third election-denying nesting doll: Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who posted thousands of leaked emails on his Twitter account on Monday.

Three days after a D.C. judge instructed her to return to Michigan, the Coen brothers–esque saga has reached its conclusion, at least for now, with Lambert turning herself in to face conspiracy charges for her involvement in the machine-tampering scheme. Notably, Oakland County Judge Jeffery Matis mandated that Lambert’s fingerprints be taken, which, despite court orders, Lambert has resisted, and that she submit a DNA sample, both of which may be used to confirm whether Lambert physically tampered with a voting machine.

A key foot soldier in Trump’s failed postelection lawfare campaign, Lambert worked on some of the highest-profile lawsuits alleging fraud, including Sydney Powell’s boondoggle “kraken” case. She now joins the ranks of former Trump legal team members facing criminal charges for their involvement in efforts to block certification of the 2020 election.

Lambert took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to allege her own conspiracy before turning herself in. “I just know too much.… And I have too much evidence,” she said.

Donald Trump has just days left to post the nearly half-billion-dollar bond in his New York civil fraud case before the state attorney general can start seizing his assets, and Letitia James seems to know exactly where she wants to start: Westchester.

Trump was fined $354 million in mid-February for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. With interest adding $112,000 per day, and adding the fines his adult sons also face, the total sum has already exceeded $464 million. James formally registered the judgment in Westchester County on March 6, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

James’s filing did not give a reason for the registration, nor did it specify which of Trump’s Westchester assets she intends to seize, but the registration will make it easier for James to secure liens. Westchester is home to two of Trump’s most valuable properties, the Trump National Golf Club Westchester and Seven Springs, a mostly undeveloped 212-acre estate.

Seven Springs featured prominently in the civil fraud trial. Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Trump had fraudulently inflated the estate’s value for years—sometimes by as much as five times the appraised value—in an effort to get more favorable terms on bank loans.

Trump was given 30 days from the day the judgment was entered to post bond. That window expires Monday. Unless an appeals court steps in, James will be allowed to start seizing Trump’s assets next week.

The appeals court has yet to rule on whether Trump can delay posting bond or post a heavily reduced one of just $100 million, as he has requested. James urged the court Wednesday to deny Trump’s request, arguing that his claims could not be trusted.

Trump’s arguments, James pointed out, were based on sworn statements by Trump Organization General Counsel Alan Garten and Gary Giulietti, one of Trump’s close friends. During the trial, Engoron determined that Giulietti could not be considered a credible witness and argued that Garten had “professional interests in this litigation.”

Trump finally admitted earlier this week that he has been unable to find an organization that will underwrite the bond for him. His lawyers wrote in a filing that to obtain the bond, they would need to post collateral worth $557 million—which they say is a “practical impossibility.”

Trump’s lawyers explained they have asked about 30 different organizations to underwrite the bond and have been turned down every time. The list of companies they can keep asking is limited, since the bond is so large, and companies so far have expressed an “unwillingness … to accept real estate as collateral.”

The former president has no one to blame but himself for his current bind. His repeated boasts about his personal wealth—despite reportedly only having about $413 million in cash assets—likely contributed to the size of the judgment. And the trial revealed that Trump was in the habit of inflating the value of his real estate assets to make himself look better when trying to secure loans. So it’s no wonder that bond providers don’t want to accept real estate as collateral.