Scandal-ridden former President and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has finally posted the $91.6 million bond that was required to file his appeal against the E. Jean Carroll judgment after US District Judge Lewis F. Kaplan denied his petition for a stay.
However, the question of how Donald got that money and, even more so, who it came from is raising serious scrutiny among experts and followers of this case, with some growing concerned that this could be a “matter of national security.”
The $91.63 million includes not only the full $83.3 million judgment but also a 9% statutory interest tacked onto surety bonds by the State of New York. The money has been set aside in a court-managed account and will be paid out to Carroll if Trump ultimately loses his appeal.
Trump’s multi-million dollar bond was guaranteed by the Federal Insurance Company — a New York-based subsidiary of the company Chubb Group LLC, headquartered in Switzerland. While the Washington Post reported that “it was not clear from court records what collateral Trump presented to obtain the bond from Chubb,” the collaboration has drawn questions and raised eyebrows, as Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg served on a trade advisory committee in the Trump White House in 2018.
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The environmental nonprofit group Rainforest Action Network (RAN) took special interest in this concerning partnership between Trump and Chubb Group, noting on their website that Chubb does business with multiple major American adversaries around the world. RAN specifically pointed out that Chubb is “insuring oil and gas extraction and transport in Russia, fueling Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
“In fact, Chubb called Russian oil and gas ‘one of the most promising activities’ of its Russian operations,'” RAN wrote. “The insurer was recently backing Nord Stream 2, a massive, controversial natural gas pipeline built by Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of gas and a majority Russian state-owned fossil fuel company (which also happens to be funded by JPMorgan Chase).”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann was one of the first to chime in on this rather fishy deal, writing on X (formerly known as Twitter) that Trump is “$90M down, $400M to go,” before noting that the details surrounding the multi-million bond agreement are murky, at best, and that “the public has no idea who may have actually put up the money or provided a guaranty to support the bond.”
“But one thing’s sure: Trump is beholden to someone for a lot of money,” Weissmann warned.
Attorney and journalist Daniel Miller responded to Weissmann with his own concerns on the matter, stating that, in his opinion, the bond guarantee was a “matter of national security,” adding that “the public has to know this information before voting in November.”
The Post did note that Chubb’s CEO was actually very vocal in his disdain for the January 6th Capitol insurrection, condemning “the violence and display of demagoguery we witnessed in our nation’s capital.”
“We should all hope for a new era of respect and decency as we meet the many common challenges facing our nation,” he said at the time.
While the matter of the E. Jean Carroll bond is squared away, for now, Trump has yet to put a dent in the $454 million civil judgment he’s been ordered to fork up in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ fraud case, and CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has already warned that the ex-president may seek out foreign help to foot that massive and growing bill.
“What does that mean if a candidate for president is on the hook for multiple, multiple millions of dollars to a foreign source? Because that, it seems to me, is the most likely source,” Toobin said.
Read the Washington Post’s full report here.
Featured image via DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos
