Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr apparently balked on indicting former President Donald Trump over fears he'd lose the case, according to a special prosecutor who resigned from the legal team this year.
The comments were made by Mark Pomerantz, the special prosecutor who quit the case, during an episode of The Cutting Edge podcast, which covers legal matters. The podcast is hosted by Columbia Law School professor John C Coffee Jr and US District Judge Jed S Rakoff.
According to Mr Pomerantz, Mr Bragg formerly worked as a prosecutor in New York, but had retired. Mr Bragg went back to work to assist former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance's investigation of the Trump Organisation. When Mr Bragg took over, he did not follow through on the case, prompting the resignation of Mr Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, another prosecutor on the team.
Mr Pomerantz reportedly questioned whether Mr Bragg was ready to take on a case the size and scope — and bearing the implications — of Mr Vance's inquiry into the Trump Organisation, according to 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 told the publication. “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?”
The case included two battles between Mr Vance and the Trump Organisation that eventually reached the US Supreme Court. Both times Mr Trump was ordered to provide years of financial documents, which prosecutors were attempting use to prove the group was committing fraud.
Mr Pomertantz said that if Mr Trump "had been Joe Blow from Kokomo, we would have indicted without a big debate."
“I believe that Donald Trump, in fact, was guilty and, second, that there was sufficient evidence as a matter of law to have sustained a guilty verdict if we went forward,” he said during the interview.
He condemned the decision not to indict, claiming it damaged the public's trust in the legal system if the rich and powerful were allowed to operate outside its reach.
“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,” he said. “The rule of law is supposed to extend to the rich and poor alike, to the vulnerable, to the powerful."
