‘No one’s ever seen a bond this size’: Eric Trump criticises $454m judgment against his father

Eric Trump has come out railing against the $454m fraudulent property valuations judgment against his father Donald Trump, saying bonds the size of the half-a-billion dollar one the former president is being required to put up “don’t exist in this country”.

As a court-imposed deadline ticks down on the former president’s family and their businesses to come up with almost half-a-billion dollars, the 40-year-old executive vice-president of the Trump Organization told Fox News on Sunday that bond issuers laughed when he approached them for that sum.

“No one’s ever seen a bond this size,” Eric Trump said. “Every single person, when I came to them saying, ‘Hey, can I get a half-billion-dollar bond?’ They were laughing. Top executives of large insurance companies had never seen anything of this size.”

He told host Maria Bartiromo: “A $10m bond is a large bond. A $15m bond is an enormous bond. A half-a-billion dollar bond?”

On Friday, Donald Trump said he has nearly $500m in cash and suggested he could afford bond in the New York case, which resulted in the former president, his company and some of its executives all being found liable for fraudulent business practices. But that contradicted Trump’s lawyers who have said a surety that would protect Trump’s assets from seizure while he appeals the judgement was “impossible” to obtain.

As soon as Tuesday morning, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, could begin to seize Trump’s assets, including his bank accounts and property. Eric Trump, who was fined close to $4m by Judge Arthur Engoron in the same case, was asked how he thought the court had arrived at the fine.

“You know what it was, it was a crooked number,” Eric Trump said. “They’re trying to put my father out of