"Any foreign adversary seeking to buy a President knows the price," warns Rep. Sean Casten.

“Any foreign adversary seeking to buy a President knows the price,” warns Rep. Sean Casten

A Democrat who sits on the House Financial Services Committee warned that former President Donald Trump’s inability to secure a bond for his $464 million fraud judgment makes him a “massive national security risk.”

Trump’s lawyers in a filing on Monday told a New York appeals court that he cannot secure a bond after approaching 30 underwriters.

“The amount of the judgment, with interest, exceeds $464 million, and very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching that magnitude,” the attorneys wrote.

The filing quoted an insurance broker who signed an affidavit stating that securing the bond is a “practical impossibility.”

  • ramble81
    561·
    8 months ago

    So that’s an interesting question there. An elected official gets to see top secret information that anyone else would have to go through a stringent check on. Why shouldn’t the elected official be held to the same standard as they will be accessing the same information? Why does being elected override that?

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      Well, in my opinion, I’d rather have a homeless person as president than a rich bastard. I don’t think wealth should influence electability, but it does anyway. There should be plenty of checks in place though, just not requiring wealth.

    • exocrinous@startrek.website
      2·
      8 months ago

      Because those processes aren’t democratic, and the office of the president ought to be democratic.

      Imagine that the US air force is operating an extrasolar space exploration program out of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex using an ancient egyptian wormhole generator. Naturally, knowledge of the Stargate program is restricted to air force personnel with top secret security clearance. But it is absolutely essential that a democratically elected president should have knowledge and oversight of the program, and the power to make knowledge of extraterrestrial life made public if democratically appropriate. Such programs should not solely be known of by personnel who pass the military’s standard for secrecy, because otherwise you essentially have a government controlled by the military.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      48·
      8 months ago

      I mean I agree.

      I also think that we could do away with primaries and parties together, then put together a list of qualifications for all the available elected positions; each voter is required to when registering to list their qualifications; then at random we select a pool of potential applicants for a given campaign cycle. We then vote on the candidates and decide. Public office shouldn’t be a career, it should be a civic obligation like jury duty. Unless you have a valid reason to not hold office, welp, if your number comes up…