New York Attorney General Letitia James said she is prepared to seize Donald Trump's assets — including 40 Wall Street — if he does not have the cash to cover the $355 million judgment against him in the civil fraud case that ended last week.
James made the comments in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday.
"If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets," James told ABC News.
Judge Arthur Engoron on Friday imposed a $354.8 million fine — plus roughly $100 million in pre-judgment interest — against Trump for duping banks and lenders with financial statements that inflated his wealth. Trump is appealing the ruling.
Syracuse University of Law professor Greg Germain told Newsweek that Trump has "a strong argument that when the attorney general seeks to punish for past use, rather than prevent future use, she would have to show all of the traditional elements of fraud," which Engoron ruled she did not.
Regardless, James told ABC News she's "very confident" and is already eyeing her first property to seize.
"We are prepared to make sure that the judgment is paid to New Yorkers, and yes, I look at 40 Wall Street each and every day," James told ABC News, pushing back on Trump's claims of a victimless crime during his testimony in November.
"There was no victim. There was no anything," Trump testified in November.
"Financial frauds are not victimless crimes. He engaged in this massive amount of fraud. It wasn't just a simple mistake, a slight oversight, the variations are wildly exaggerated, and the extent of the fraud was staggering," James told ABC News. "If average New Yorkers went into a bank and submitted false documents, the government would throw the book at them, and the same should be true for former presidents."
Engoron's ruling came on the heels of a jury last month ordering Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. That's on top of the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll in a related trial last year.
A GoFundMe campaign to cover Trump's $355 million judgment raised $84,000 in the first 24 hours and stands at more than $741,000 as of Tuesday evening.
Information from the Associated Press as used in this report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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