Experts Warn Donald Trump's $464M Bond Failure Poses 'Massive National Security Risk'

Experts in politics, law, and national security are uniting to warn of the possible threats to national security that surround Donald Trump, and their concerns are growing more intense.

30 surety firms declined to get the $464 million bond that Trump needs to pay the State of New York after losing his civil fraud trial, Raw Story reported. Experts have warned that Trump's massive financial debt might endanger national security.

On X, formerly Twitter, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said, "We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump's mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk."

"After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgments that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million," the ethics group wrote on its website. "But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected."

Trump's previous history and Russian ties are also one of the reasons experts are scared. MSNBC's Steve Benen reports that "it's now 'expected' that Manafort will be hired" to assist in the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. New York Times reported in 2017 that Paul Manafort, Trump's 2016 campaign chairman, worked with Russia to undermine Hilary Clinton.

"A court filing that was inadvertently unsealed revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services," NPR reported in 2019. Manafort's ties to Russian intelligence also led the Senate Intelligence Committee to designate him as a 'significant' counterintelligence threat.

Tim O'Brien, an MSNBC political commentator, Bloomberg editor, and author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald, noted in an MSNBC op-ed that the financial trap Trump is in "intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests," particularly those who are "eager to influence US policy."

O'Brien predicts that "Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, will have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments," wondering whether the classified documents he tried to illegally hold on to were for a prospective sale.

According to reports, as is common during presidential transitions, the U.S. intelligence community intends to provide the GOP nominee Trump classified intelligence briefings.

But in The Atlantic, retired U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols—a specialist on Russia, nuclear weapons, and matters of national security—argues that this custom ought to be reexamined this year. "Trump's scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright red light in the clearance process," the author notes after highlighting Trump's admiration for authoritarian leaders.