Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications director under Donald Trump, said she’s concerned that the ex-president’s dire financial predicament will lead him to accept help from foreign adversaries.
“It’s incredibly bad. This is a total blow to the brand of Trump,” Griffin said, discussing the Monday deadline for Trump to put up a $464 million bond or face the seizure of his assets.
“What I’m worried about is this,” Griffin told CNN’s Sara Sidner on Thursday. “When Donald Trump is backed into a corner, he gets reckless and he makes reckless decisions.”
Trump’s lawyers said in a filing this week that he had been rejected by 30 companies as he tried to come up with the bond for his civil fraud conviction, which he is appealing. The former president was accused of falsifying business records of his Trump Organization for years.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has already taken steps to seize his assets if he doesn’t make the deadline.
“Where’s he going to turn?” Griffin asked. “There is a possibility he’s going to look to foreign — it could be adversaries, it could be individuals within nations that are adversaries — to lend him money if he’s not able to secure loans here. And I think that’s a very real possibility that folks need to be thinking about in the broader context of this.”
Trump has no “moral compass when it comes to America’s standing in the world,” she said, adding that he “certainly puts his interests before the country.”
“So, if an oligarch in a Russia or a Chinese business official wants to help him get this money, I have no question that he would end up accepting it,” she said.
Multiple national security experts have warned of the risks Trump’s debt poses to the country’s security.
Former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice, for example, warned earlier this week that if Trump accepts money “from an individual or an entity, whether domestic or international, that individual or entity will potentially have real influence over him.”
Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba ducked a question Wednesday on whether her client asked Russia or Saudi Arabia or any other country for help coming up with the money.
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