Don Hankey is legitimately a billionaire, unlike some people who claim to be and who are merely blowing smoke and looking to impress people. Ergo, one would think that he had the savvy to assess any given business situation. But evidently not. Reuters is reporting that “the billionaire businessman whose company Knight Specialty Insurance provided the $175 million bond that Donald Trump posted in his New York civil fraud case, told Reuters that the fee his firm charged the former U.S. President was low” and it was low, “because Knight did not think there was much risk involved.” News flash to Mr. Hankey: any time you deal with Donald Trump, things get risky and complicated and we mean jimmy pronto.
“We have been getting a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls. Maybe that’s part of the reason he had trouble with other insurance companies,” Hankey said, adding that despite the issues, he did not regret providing the bond.
Maybe not yet, this minute, but I’m willing to bet he changes his mind as the days go by.
On Thursday, James’ office questioned the $175 million bond, asking that Knight provide proof that it has enough assets to pay if Trump’s appeal fails. A New York judge will hold a hearing on the matter on April 22.Hankey, whose net worth is pegged by Forbes at $7.4 billion, said he was taken aback by James’ questioning the bond. “I’m surprised they’re coming down harder on our bond or looking for reasons to cause issues with our instrument,” he said.
Hankey, who runs a group of businesses including a provider of subprime automotive loans that has been reprimanded by regulators for predatory behaviour involving customers, said Trump offered collateral for the $175 million in cash.He said the cash is held at a brokerage firm and pledged to Knight, and that Knight can access it if needed.
“I don’t know if it came from Donald Trump or from Donald Trump and supporters,” Hankey said of the cash Trump provided for collateral.
Maybe it came straight from the coffers of the RNC and some House or Senate member is going to feel the crunch in a few months when the election starts to ramp up and advertising and outreach money is needed, only to find out that it isn’t there, it’s all gone to bail Donald out of his legal troubles.
Hankey said he first approached Trump’s representatives to discuss how he could help Trump with the bond, before the former president managed to get it reduced on appeal from $454 million to $175 million. Trump would have had to “come up with a lot of collateral or somebody else would,” Hankey said.
What intrigues me here is that this guy is clearly waffling. That has been the case since he got involved in this matter. Again, I will quote Seth Abramson, who has researched this topic extensively and who also finds it unusual that Hankey and his business associate don’t seem to know Trump or much of anything about him, yet they seem to always be the people he comes to to get bailed out.
Here’s how that goes:
- Both men say that they’ve never met or even spoken to Donald Trump—by any means or for any purpose—though Trump is the man they both vote for every election and have lavishly supported financially (as a politician and a borrower);
- Hankey says that he didn’t even know one of his companies (Axos Financial) was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump, even as Garrabrants says he was so familiar with Trump’s property empire while lending him hundreds of millions via Axos that—despite never having met or spoken to the man he was lending to—he didn’t need the usual information about Trump any lender would need from a borrower, didn’t need to do a walk-through of Trump National Doral before rescuing it from ruin because he was familiar enough with it already to become involved with it immediately upon request, and has only been in Trump Tower a single time for a walkthrough, during which walkthrough he only saw Eric Trump and never met his father (whose primary residence at the time was in the building Garrabrants was then in, and who was at the time seeking hundreds of millions from Garrabrant, despite allegedly never deigning to meet him); and
- to the extent that these two men have been termed “the lender[s] of last resort to the Trumps” by Rolling Stone, this fact is nevertheless more or less news to them because (a) Garrabrants has never met or spoken to Jared Kushner despite being involved with his businesses to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and Kushner, for his part, says he neither knows nor has met Garrabrants or even was aware Garrabrants had rescuing him financially until after it happened), and (b) Hankey only reached out to Donald Trump to save him from financial and political ruin because “he would have done the same for anyone.”
These are the facially unserious, impossible-to-credit tales of ignorance, aloofness, and lily-white naïveté now being sold to major media by one of the richest men in the United States (Hankey, net worth $7.4 billion) and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the United States (Garrabrants, annual salary last reported at around $34.5 million). Really?
Add to this the fact that Hankey thought that whatever company finally bonded Trump would not be subject to scrutiny, or at least inquiry, after he had been turned down by 30 companies prior to Knight? That does strain credibility, to say the least.
Let’s see where all this goes next. And buckle up for two other epics, the final demise of Truth Social and the hush money trial, which, at the rate things are going, should be happening around the same time. The way Truth Social is headed, it can’t take too many more weeks like the one it just had. And the hush money trial convenes in two days.
Hankey Panky.
If these yahoos are dumb enough to get financially involved with Trump, they ain’t just paying dumb.
he came to me with tears in his eyes and said, “sir, we have to help you out here, because you’re our messiah…” cough, hack wheeze… Man, women, camera, TV…