Former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz is speaking out after quitting an investigation into Donald Trump earlier in the year once it became clear that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was moving towards not prosecuting the former president. In his most in-depth comments yet, Pomerantz told the legal podcast, The Cutting Edge, that biggest stumbling block to indicting Trump were concerns that the prosecution might lose.
While Pomerantz ultimately disagrees with that concern, he did walk the podcast through why Bragg had reservations about taking over an elaborate case from his predecessor Cy Vance. Via The Daily Beast:
“It’s very hard to take somebody who has not been exposed to those facts on a trip through the capillaries of the financial statements in a meeting or even a meeting or two,” he said on the podcast. “The devil was really in the details, and the details couldn’t be explained in kind of short form… ultimately, the DA—the incoming D.A.—and the team were not comfortable going forward. So did we do a bad job of laying out the facts? Did they not hear what we were saying? Were the facts too complicated to explain in the format that we were using?”
As Pomerantz explained, there was “complicated and far-reaching” evidence indicating that Trump had provided false financial information to banks to obtain loans. According to Pomerantz, if the person involved was anyone but the former president, the prosecution would not have had cold feet. He also argued that even if the prosecution did lose the case against Trump it was still the right thing to do because, in Pomerantz’s opinion, there was a preponderance of evidence he committed financial fraud.
“My view is that it is toxic to have people believe that the criminal justice system is unable to hold people accountable if those people have huge financial and political influence,” Pomerantz said. “The rule of law is supposed to extend to the rich and poor alike, to the vulnerable, to the powerful. And I was utterly convinced that if the defendant had not been Donald Trump or the putative defendant, if it had been Joe Blow from Kokomo, we would have indicted without a big debate.”
(Via The Daily Beast)