The Case Against Trump

Last month, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg all but killed the state's criminal investigation into Donald Trump, halting grand jury procedures and resulting in the two lead prosecutors to resign in protest. Bragg thought the case could not possibly be won because the evidence wasn't there.

 

This looks like a case where Bragg said that he wasn't going forward with the case after the previous DA, Cy Vance, empaneled a grand jury.  The lead prosecutors obviously wanted to continue. Whatever the conflict was, it's gotten so bad that both lead prosecutors have resigned.

This reeks. All of it. No wonder then that the NY state case against Trump has moved into a much more aggressive phase. Tish James's office would have been working with the Manhattan DA on this. Surely they got wind that Bragg was going to all but shut the federal case down.

 

I don't know who got to Bragg, or to Justice, but both lead prosecutors resigning means that can't be swept away easily.  There's a lot more to this story.

How much of it we'll ever know, I have no idea.

 

Now we know: A month later, we find out exactly why the lead prosecutors resigned, because they absolutely had a criminal case and it was scuttled by Bragg himself.

One of the senior Manhattan prosecutors who investigated Donald J. Trump believed that the former president was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was “a grave failure of justice” not to hold him accountable, according to a copy of his resignation letter.

The prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, submitted his resignation last month after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, abruptly stopped pursuing an indictment of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Pomerantz, 70, a prominent former federal prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer who came out of retirement to work on the Trump investigation, resigned on the same day as Carey R. Dunne, another senior prosecutor leading the inquiry.

Mr. Pomerantz’s Feb. 23 letter, obtained by The New York Times, offers a personal account of his decision to resign and for the first time states explicitly his belief that the office could have convicted the former president. Mr. Bragg’s decision was “contrary to the public interest,” he wrote.

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

Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne planned to charge Mr. Trump with falsifying business records, specifically his annual financial statements — a felony in New York State.

Mr. Bragg’s decision not to pursue charges then — and the resignations that followed — threw the fate of the long-running investigation into serious doubt. If the prosecutors had secured an indictment of Mr. Trump, it would have been the highest-profile case ever brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and would have made Mr. Trump the first American president to face criminal charges.

Earlier this month, The Times reported that the investigation unraveled after weeks of escalating disagreement between the veteran prosecutors overseeing the case and the new district attorney. Much of the debate centered on whether the prosecutors could prove that Mr. Trump knowingly falsified the value of his assets on annual financial statements, The Times found, a necessary element to proving the case.

While Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz were confident that the office could demonstrate that the former president had intended to inflate the value of his golf clubs, hotels and office buildings, Mr. Bragg was not. He balked at pursuing an indictment against Mr. Trump, a decision that shut down Mr. Pomerantz’s and Mr. Dunne’s presentation of evidence to a grand jury and prompted their resignations.

Mr. Bragg has said that his office continues to conduct the investigation. For that reason, Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general who became district attorney in January, is barred from commenting on its specifics.

 

Not much at the core has changed: I told you then that Bragg decided there was no case and no prosecution, and that part remains. What's new is that we now have confirmation that at least one of the lead prosecutors believed Trump has committed a felony and were going to charge him.

 

I've laid out my reasons why Bragg killed the investigation, because there's no reason to believe his office is pursuing charges anymore, despite the office saying "they are continuing" the probe. It's as dead as Richard Nixon.

 

Bragg is probably right about not being able to get a conviction, and that's because while finding 12 people in Manhattan who would send Trump to Mars in a coffin is easy, finding 12 people who want to risk being hunted down like dogs by corrupt NYPD Trumpers is going to be next to impossible. The Trumpies will do everything they can to threaten the jurors and end the trial.

Do we really think Trump wouldn't order the jurors harmed or worse? C'mon. He wouldn't have to.

But the fact remains Trump is facing corporate fraud. Here's hoping that AG Tish James and her civil case can get the goods still.