'He is getting exposed': Trump biographer says ex-president will have to give up records

Former President Donald Trump is finally going to be forced to open his real books and show the world his true financial workings, biographer Tim O'Brien told MSNBC's Ali Velshi on Thursday, as New York Attorney General Letitia James prepares to seize assets to cover his $464 million judgment for civil fraud.

"I think now you see at least on a financial basis, he is getting exposed for decades of what he has been doing, which is inflating, lying, exaggerating and however you want to describe it how much money he has and what he does with that," said O'Brien. "I think that is one of the things gnawing at him more than anything else in this current round is that the emperor has no financial clothing. He said in a deposition a year ago that he had $400 million in cash on hand and adding to that amount on a monthly basis and in significant ways. He either lied under oath or perjured himself on that position, or he is a really bad businessman, or blew through that somehow magically over the last year, or doesn't want to touch it because he wants to lay these debts off on, perhaps, people donating to his campaign and for whatever reason that money he says isn't there now. So he is going to have to rely on the good graces of other people and he doesn't have a lot of options."

Regarding the rumors he could file for bankruptcy, O'Brien continued, "I think we would've gotten indications of that and it would have to be a complex filing. And I think Letitia James is waiting to attach his assets on Monday. She has been very sharp, I think, about specifically naming some of the properties that she would want to attach."

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"Like 40 Wall Street," cut in Velshi.

"The reality is, there are certain properties that he deeply prizes," said O'Brien. "In the early 90s, when he went through those six corporate bankruptcies, he came within an inch of personal bankruptcy, but for a piece of his father's estate that his siblings gave him so he could stay solvent. Otherwise, he would have gone under personally. At that time he got on his knees to his bankers and said, take what you want but don't take my condo or take Mar-a-Lago. I think the attorney general's office is hip to the idea that there are certain toys more valuable to Trump than others, and I think that's got to be gnawing at him as well."

"Even if there's not a bankruptcy filing, he will have to have very detailed proclamations within the filing about his assets and the debts held against those assets and, again, a kind of public revelation about what he has that he never wanted to do, because what it will show in the end is a guy who said when you watched his campaign in 2015, I am really rich and I'm worth $10 billion, I'm worth $8 billion, I'm worth $6 billion, and these are all the numbers and he is nowhere close to that, and he doesn't want to pop his own balloon in that regard, but he's probably going to be forced to."

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