By Adam Reiss, Lisa Rubin and Dareh Gregorian -
NBC News
A court clerk in New York officially filed a fraud judgment of more than $464 million against former President Donald Trump and top executives of his company, an amount that will grow more than $111,000 a day until it is paid.
The action starts the clock on the amount of time Trump has to file an appeal and post bail for the sum.
Failure to do so will allow the New York attorney general's office to begin collection proceedings against Trump and his co-defendants in the civil fraud case.
The vast majority of the $464,576,230.62 judgment –
$454,156,783.05, to be exact
– is against Trump and his companies.
The rest of the sentence is against his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who have run the Trump Organization since 2017, and former top executives Allen Weisselberg and Jeff McConney.
Former President Donald Trump leaves the New York Supreme Court, Thursday, February 15, 2024.Getty Images
The amount includes late payment interest accrued from the compensation of more than $350 million that Judge Arthur Engoron issued last week.
Trump's lawyers had sought to delay sentencing, presumably to give them more time to secure bail funding, but Engoron rejected that request Thursday.
[Trump defends in vitro fertilization after Republican troubles over the court ruling in Alabama]
"You have not explained,
much less justified
, any basis for a suspension," Engoron told Trump lawyer Clifford S. Robert in an email before signing the order.
The sentence became official this Friday after it was recorded by the court clerk.
Alina Habba, Trump's attorney, said on Fox News on Monday that "we will be prepared" to post bail.
Bail will probably be very expensive.
Although courts have discretion to set the exact amount of the judgment, New York courts typically require up to 120% of the judgment, including all prior interest.
This means he could have to pay bail of more than $500 million.
In a ruling handed down last week following a months-long trial, Engoron found that Trump and his top executives had intentionally engaged in a massive and protracted scheme to improperly inflate his assets on financial statements so he could benefit from favorable interest rates on loans and insurance to which he was not actually entitled.
The judge ordered him to pay what he deemed
"ill-gotten gains"
from his years-long fraud and also barred Trump from "serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation or other legal entity in New York for a period of three years," including your company.
Trump has declared that he had done nothing illegal and that the case was part of a gigantic Democratic conspiracy designed to take him down.
Engoron cited Trump and his executives' lack of remorse in his sentencing, saying their "complete lack of repentance and remorse borders on the pathological."
"They are only accused of inflating the value of assets to make more money. The documents prove it again and again. This is a level sin, not a mortal one," Engoron wrote.
"The defendants did not commit murder or set fires. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. However, the defendants are unable to admit the error of their actions."
He considered that their "refusal to admit the mistake – indeed, to continue making it, according to the Independent Monitor – forces this court to conclude that
they will continue to make it in the future unless judicially restrained.
"
Last month, Trump received an $83.3 million verdict in the defamation case brought against the former president by writer E. Jean Carroll.
The sentence was handed down on February 8.
Trump has said he plans to appeal that verdict as well.