Jose Pagliery

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyThe little-known insurance company that rescued Donald Trump by providing a last-minute $175 million bank fraud bond isn’t just unlicensed in New York; it hasn’t even been vetted by a voluntary state entity that would verify it meets minimum “eligibility standards” to prove financial stability.Perhaps even more troubling, the legal document from Knight Specialty Insurance Company doesn’t actually promise it will pay the money if the former president loses his $464 million bank fraud case on appeal. Instead, it says Trump will pay, negating the whole point of an insurance company guarantee, according to three legal and bond experts who reviewed the contract for The Daily Beast.“This is not common… the only reason this would be done is to limit the liability to the surety,” said N. Alex Hanley, an expert in how companies appeal enormous judgments.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / GettyDonald Trump’s upcoming criminal trial in New York City is set to derail his presidential campaign until June. But his legal problems could complicate his White House aspirations much longer—and much more severely—as the former president faces the very real prospect of being a convicted felon by the start of the summer, with court sentencing that could actually prevent him from attending the July GOP convention in person.Trump’s problems can be divided into stark realities and dire possibilities.What’s a stark reality is that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the former president for faking business records to hide a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, will keep Trump in a courtroom four days a week from April 15 until possibly early June, constraining his ability to campaign.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyRetired American generals vehemently say that no, Donald Trump cannot deploy SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival. Gun groups howl that the United States is turning into Communist China. And a convicted Jan. 6 rioter warns that President Joe Biden could someday get sued over the death of a jogger in Georgia.These are among the 18 various groups that shared their wisdom with the Supreme Court earlier this month, filing amicus briefs on the same day that Trump told the high court why he should be able to dodge a federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election on false pretenses.Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump has finally reached the nation’s highest judicial authority, which will determine whether the business tycoon can be put on trial. The timing of the nine justices’ eventual decision will determine if the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is to face trial in court before Election Day in November.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Shannon Stapleton/ReutersThe judge overseeing Donald Trump’s upcoming hush money trial in New York hit the former president with a gag order on Tuesday, just one day after Trump peddled a conspiracy theory about a prosecutor—and hours after the tycoon levied attacks against the judge’s daughter.New York Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan forbade Trump from speaking publicly about line prosecutors and court staff—or even their family members. He also subjected Trump to the same sorts of precautionary warnings the former president has faced from other judges in separate cases, ordering him to not even mention any prospective jurors.The snap decision was made on the heels of Trump’s anger-laden press conference yesterday at his 40 Wall Street building in downtown Manhattan, where the former president lashed out after suffering a minor loss in court when Merchan set his criminal trial—Trump’s first ever—to start on April 15.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brendan McDermid/GettyA state appellate court swooped in to save Donald Trump on Monday, just as the clock ran out on a half-billion-dollar bond he was due to post to hold off the New York Attorney General from seizing his properties.In a curtly-worded two-page order that didn’t explain their reason for giving Trump a last-minute grace period, five judges simply said that AG Letitia James can’t yet enforce the $464 million judgment against Trump—as long as Trump can post a much lower bond of $175 million within the next 10 days.Trump recently revealed that he couldn’t find any surety company willing to be on the hook for the half billion dollars it would take to halt property seizures while the case is on appeal. But this decision vastly lowers the sum required to stop the AG for now.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/ReutersDonald Trump’s upcoming Manhattan trial over his Stormy Daniels hush money cover-up was unceremoniously delayed last week when federal prosecutors suddenly dumped 200,000 pages worth of evidence at his request.But what was unknown—until now—is that the Justice Department had been holding back similar records from public disclosure for years.The surprise decision by federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York, which worked on a previous iteration of this investigation before Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg picked up the baton, has thrown the case into chaos just weeks before the trial.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyDonald Trump on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to grant him “absolute immunity” as a means to kill the federal criminal investigation into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, recasting the unprecedented chapter in American history as nothing more than him doing his job as commander-in-chief.In a 63-page brief, the former president’s lawyers argued that everything Trump did to fight the transfer of power to Joe Biden was somehow within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties—repeating a claim that has failed to convince a trial judge or the District of Columbia appellate court.The filing comes just one month before the conservative-leaning court, where three of the nine justices were appointed by Trump himself, holds a historic hearing in April to hear oral arguments from both sides on the immunity question.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyDonald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, paid $82,500 last week to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had silenced a sexually harassed waitress by tricking her into an unfair hush money deal, according to the ex-employee’s lawyer.But the curiously worded contract left the former president’s own attorney Alina Habba—a rising star in his orbit—wide open to getting sued herself.Trump and his top advisers are already a magnet for legal trouble. Habba, who already settled a discrimination lawsuit by her former legal secretary, is no exception. But now she faces the wrath of Alice Bianco, who was once a waitress at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the real estate tycoon’s summertime abode.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jay Paul/ReutersThe MAGA-friendly federal judge who keeps siding with Donald Trump in his Mar-a-Lago classified records case has forced prosecutors to make a stark choice: allow jurors to see a huge trove of national secrets or let him go.U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ultimatum Monday night came as a surprise twist in what could have been a simple order; one merely asking federal prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers for proposed jury instructions at the upcoming trial.But as she has done repeatedly, Cannon used this otherwise innocuous legal step as yet another way to swing the case wildly in favor of the man who appointed her while he was president.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Alyssa Pointer/ReutersDonald Trump simultaneously claims he’s much wealthier than a court says but too broke to appeal the judgment that threatens to take away those very riches.In a court filing written with glaring irony, Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday revealed that the real estate tycoon has failed to secure the gigantic, half-billion dollar bond required to temporarily halt the New York Attorney General from seizing his properties after he lost a bank fraud trial.The deadline clock is now ticking, with only a week left until AG Letitia James can ask a judge for permission to start grabbing Trump’s Monopoly board portfolio. The former president has until Sunday, March 24, to obtain what amounts to a massive loan—with a surety company guaranteeing to the court that Trump will pay his financial penalty if he ultimately loses the case on appeal.Read more at The Daily Beast.