Donald Trump has yet to pay a court-ordered $10,000-a-day fine for flouting a subpoena for his business documents.As of Thursday, he owes $30,000, but the court order does not demand that he cut a check every day.Instead, what he owes New York’s AG will accumulate by $10K a day — likely until he personally swears an affidavit explaining why he has no documents to turn over.Sign up for our weekday newsletter, packed with original analysis, news, and trends — delivered right to your inbox.Donald Trump has yet to pay a penny of a court-ordered $10,000-a-day fine, which as of Thursday totals $30,000, Insider has learned.
But the former president’s failure to cut one of his classic, Sharpie-signed checks does not mean he’s thumbing his nose at the court or in any way out of compliance.
It only means that the sum he owes New York Attorney General Letita James will keep accumulating each day — his court-ordered penalty as part of being held in contempt for dodging her subpoena for his personal business documents, according to people close to the matter.
The amount he owes will just keep rising — $40,000 on Friday, $50,000 on Saturday, and so on — as an IOU to the AG, until Trump either turns over the documents she wants, or explains to the satisfaction of a Manhattan judge just how it is that he has nothing to turn over.
So why doesn’t he have to pay yet? So why is his non-payment, for now, OK? Trump has filed a notice saying he plans to appeal the contempt order, but there’s so far been no order to halt the fine pending appeal.
The answer can be found in the contempt order that set the fine, as signed into effect on Tuesday by New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.
“Donald J.
Trump is in contempt of Court and must pay a fine of $10,000 per day, from the date of this Decision and Order, until he purges such contempt to the satisfaction of this Court,” Engoron wrote in his order.
The order makes no mention of whether the fine must be paid daily, weekly, or in a lump sum after Trump “purges” the contempt.
So unless the AG’s office demands otherwise — and that demand is OK’d by the court — it’s perfectly OK for Trump to keep his checkbook closed for now.
What would halt the fine? As for precisely what Trump must do to halt the fine, here, too, the contempt order does not specify.”Until he satisfies his obligations,” it only says, or “until he purges such contempt.”
There are however, some very strong hints of what would “satisfy his obligations,” hints found both in the order itself and in the judge’s words from the bench on Monday, when he found Trump in contempt .
All point to the judge wanting Trump to personally swear out an affidavit that specifies where he searched for the demanded documents,and why those searches came up empty.
Where is Trump’s own affidavit, the judge has asked at least four times this week, on paper and from the bench.
“Mr.Trump has not refuted, with admissible evidence, OAG’s [the Office of the Attorney General’s] detailed assertions that he failed to search numerous file cabinets in various locations,” Engoron wrote in the contempt order.
Instead, the only accounting of Trump’s search for documents came from a Trump attorney affidavit that simply affirmed Trump’s papers had been searched for.
Just four pages long, it gave no details of what locations were searched.
A sworn statement from Trump himself “Not only did Mr.Trump fail to submit an affidavit himself, which this Court believes would have been the best practice, as he is the most obvious person to affirm where any responsive documents in his possession, custody, and control would be located, but the attorney affirmation submitted on behalf of Mr.Trump contained only conclusory statements, rather than details of a diligent search,” the order said.
“I feel like there’s an 800 pound gorilla in the room here,” the judge told the parties from the bench on Monday.
“Why don’t we have an affidavit from him?” he asked, meaning Trump.”Why not get an affiavit from him? He’s been running his business 20, 30 years.”
Later in the same hearing Monday, the judge said it again, in response to Trump lawyer Alina Habba stating, “We have nothing to hide.”
“There a difference,” the judge answered, “between saying something, and saying something under oath.”
The AG’s office has complained it’s been given just 10 documents from Trump’s personal business files, all turned over by the Trump Organization, which has been under subpoena to produce all documents, including Trump’s, for two years.
Trump himself has been under subpoena to produce his own documents since December, and has provided zero, the AG has complained.
Trump Tower in Manhattan Spencer Platt / Getty Images James is especially intent on getting Trump’s hard-copy documents, which the business’s own lawyer has sworn in a deposition are stored in file cabinets in the Trump Organization’s headquarters in Trump Tower, the former president’s skyscraper on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Trump’s side has been virtually silent on those file cabinets.
“You can’t just say ‘I don’t have anything,'” the judge also said on Monday.
“You have to say where you looked.”
James, a Democrat and outspoken Trump critic, has been investigating alleged financial wrongdoing at Trump’s real estate business for three years.She has said in official filings that she has evidence that over the past decade, Trump repeatedly mis-stated how much his assets are worth in order to win hundreds of millions in loans and millions more in tax breaks.
Trump has said repeatedly thta there has been no wrongdoing at his business, and he has called the probe a politically-motivated witch hunt.
His lawyers also say James already has 900,000 documents from the Trump Organization, and that Trump has nothing more to give .
Habba told reporters after court on Monday that she hoped to clear the matter up quickly by swearing out an affidavit of her own, asserting the details of how Trump’s documents had been searched for.
She did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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