'Very big can of worms': Ex-prosecutor says Trump may seek 'foreign' help to pay judgments

07 March 2024

Former President Donald Trump owes more than half a billion dollars in civil judgments, and his legal expenses are only expected to continue skyrocketing this year. One legal expert argues that Trump may end up trying to get bailed out by foreign governments as his crushing losses in court pile up.

Former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin said recently that even though the former president was granted permission by the court to seek loans from banks to help pay his civil judgments in New York, financial institutions may not be so eager to loan to an adjudicated fraudster. This could prompt him to seek out benefactors from overseas, who would almost certainly want something in return.

"What if he goes to foreign sources? What if he goes to Azerbaijan? He has a lot of business overseas. What if he goes to Russia?" Toobin said in a CNN interview. "What if he goes and gets hundreds of millions of dollars from overseas?"

"What does that mean if a candidate for president is 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 added. "Banks, at this point, don’t want anything to do with him. Deutsche Bank has lived a nightmare for decades now because they’ve been associated with Trump."

"So I think foreign is his only option," he said. "And that raises a very big can of worms."

The former president was hit with a $454 million judgment — which includes both penalties and interest — after losing his civil fraud case to New York Attorney General Letitia James. That came after Trump was ordered to pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation verdict, in which he falsely asserted that she fabricated her sexual assault allegations against him for financial reasons. Trump is also in the middle of appealing a separate $5 million judgment for sexually abusing Carroll. He also owes $400,000 to the New York Times after he unsuccessfully sued them over their reporting on his tax issues.

When combining those judgments with the $55 million he's already paid in legal bills in 2023, the 45th president of the United States owes in the neighborhood of $600 million in civil judgments. And that could be just the beginning.

More judgments may be on their way after Trump declined to press his argument for immunity from federal civil judgments to the Supreme Court. This means that police officers injured battling Trump supporters during the January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol could sue the former president for his role in riling up the crowd prior to the storming of the capitol building.

As Toobin mentioned, Trump has overseas business interests, including with America's adversaries. In 2017, WBUR interviewed golf journalist James Dodson, who recalled a conversation with Trump's adult son, Eric, while touring the Trump golf club in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dodson said Eric Trump casually mentioned having access to $100 million in funding, which Dodson found odd given that the US was still in the midst of an economic recession, and banks were hesitant to provide loans to develop golf courses.

"He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We've got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time," Dodson told WBUR. Eric Trump later denied making those claims.

Aside from possible Russian investment in Trump's golf courses, Reuters reported in 2017 that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports invested more than $98 million in multiple Trump-branded luxury condominiums in Southern Florida. According to Reuters, these investors included "politically connected businessmen, such as a former executive in a Moscow-based state-run construction firm that works on military and intelligence facilities, the founder of a St. Petersburg investment bank and the co-founder of a conglomerate with interests in banking, property and electronics."

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