TrumpWatch: Trump Dodges Serious Threat Of Criminal Indictment

Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | March 24, 2022

“The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.”

Those deeply powerful words came last month in a letter of resignation from Mark Pomerantz, a lead prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s business practices, obtained by The New York Times.

Pomerantz, a highly regarded prosecutor who led the Criminal Division of the U.S Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1990s, had been leading the Manhattan D.A’ s Trump investigation, along with another prosecutor, for more than a year. The investigation began in 2019. Pomerantz concluded that Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” to not hold him accountable, according to his letter.

Pomerantz resigned last month after the newly elected D.A, Alvin Bragg, with his own past experience as a prosecutor but with less than two months on the job, rejected the recommendation of the lead prosecutors to proceed with an indictment of Trump based on the almost three-year investigation.

According to Pomerantz’s letter:

Trump’s “financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.”

Trump’s business practices have long been controversial and, in a highly unusual move, his accounting firm, Mazars USA, recently notified Trump that it was withdrawing from serving as his accountant and pointedly informed him that it would no longer stand behind a decade of annual financial statements it had prepared for the Trump Organization.

In 2019, Forbes reported on Trump’s long history of lying about his wealth – both overestimating his wealth when it served him and low-balling it when it helped him evade taxes.

The Manhattan D.A.’s office, under former D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr., and the New York Attorney General, The Washington Post reported, had “spent years working to determine if Trump and the Trump Organization tried to decrease tax liability by falsely minimizing asset values while trying to obtain favorable loan rates using other fake estimates.”

According to The Times, Vance had given the go-ahead to move forward with a Trump indictment shortly before he retired from his position in December, after serving as D.A. for more than a decade.

In his resignation letter, Pomerantz told Bragg, the new D.A.: “I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest.”

While Bragg has said the Trump investigation is proceeding and he cannot comment on the case, it seems that as a practical matter the case is over.

We are left with these facts: A Manhattan D.A. with a decade of experience in the job gives the go-ahead to bring a criminal indictment against Donald Trump, following a lengthy investigation. A lead prosecutor, with years of experience in prosecuting white collar crime, concludes that Trump should be indicted.

Pomerantz wrote: “[W]e have evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and we believe that the prosecution would prevail if charges were brought and the matter were tried to an impartial jury. No case is perfect. Whatever the risks of bringing the case may be, I am convinced that a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”

And yet, a new D.A. – on the job for less than two months – rejects the indictment and, despite claims of a continuing investigation, appears to kill the case.

These troubling facts raise serious questions about Bragg’s actions that remain publicly unanswered.

Meanwhile, Trump has apparently dodged perhaps the most serious legal threat he has ever faced. However, additional criminal and civil investigations in other places remain underway.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. Or, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.