Mark Pomerantz Told Us This Week Was Coming

but he didn't mean to

I’ve written before about Mark Pomerantz, the former federal prosecutor and Paul Weiss partner who came out of retirement to join the get Trump project at the Manhattan DA’s office. The first two-thirds of his insane book is about the ludicrous effort to manufacture a way to charge the former president with a crime. The last third of the book, published in February of 2023, was the Ghost of Christmas Future: it told us about this week.

Pomerantz wanted the Manhattan DA — first Cy Vance, then Alvin Bragg — to charge Trump with something, but he couldn’t get them to pull the trigger. In a long series of all-hands meetings, he tried to get the office on board with the effort. But the career prosecutors just stared at him glumly, for two reasons.

The first reason? The star witness was just so obviously useless, and no one was dumb enough to want to go to court with a case built around Michael Cohen. And Pomerantz always saw this point, though he kept trying to see his way around it. Page 101:

“Dealing with Cohen was like dealing with an explosive device.” They’ve always known this. Again, Mark Pomerantz published this statement in February, 2023. See also Pomerantz’s discussion of Cohen’s disqualifying “penchant for publicity, exaggeration, and grandiose statements” on pg. 211. Now, page 213 describes a meeting in which Pomerantz tries, again, to get the office behind a prosecution, and….

Then, on page 243, Pomerantz says he considered having the Manhattan DA’s failing case sent to the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York in the hopes that it could be resurrected. Just one problem: the SDNY had already concluded that the star witness was useless.

So no one thought Michael Cohen could succeed as a witness. Federal prosecutors flatly refused to consider him as a “cooperator,” and an office full of career prosecutors fell into “chaos and confusion” at the merest reference to the possibility of using Cohen’s testimony in court.

Pomerantz left the Manhattan DA’s office in protest because the office consensus, and DA Alvin Bragg’s conclusion, was that they had nothing to charge Trump with. And then a senior lawyer from the Biden Administration left the federal government and joined the Manhattan DA’s office, and then they had enough evidence to file charges — thanks in good part to the strength of their star witness, Michael Cohen.

Take a moment to linger over all of that.

So.

The second reason no one in the Manhattan DA’s office wanted to charge Trump with a crime, by the way, is so important that Pomerantz talks about it over and over again.

Page 198:

There was no “classic victim.” Or to put that a little more plainly, there was no victim.

Page 192, with emphasis added: “Several people asked the question whether this was a good case to ‘test the limits’ of our prosecutorial power, and thought we were outside the ‘heartland’ of the statutory definition of ‘scheme to defraud’ under New York law because we had no victim who had lost money.”

Page 203, with emphasis added: “The new team spoke about the difficulties in the case — Michael Cohen’s credibility, the lack of a ‘victim’…”

Page 207, with emphasis added: “I told him we were retooling the charging theories to moot the objections about the lack of financial injury to Deutsche Bank or other victims.”

So over and over again, prosecutors in the Manhattan DA’s office expressed serious doubt about charging Trump with a crime when they couldn’t find any victims.

Finally, if you were paying close attention to all of that, you noticed Pomerantz was hunting for criminal charges in Trump’s supposed overvaluation of his properties, and the rest of the office had doubts about pursuing those charges because no one had ever lost any money from it and there were no victims.

But what about the Stormy Daniels case, the “hush money” case? They never had much of a discussion about finding victims in that case, you see, because even Pomerantz thought it was too weak to pursue, absent some miraculously creative lawyering to repurpose a statute that wasn’t really on point. Look at the table of contents: He calls the Stormy Daniels case “the ‘Zombie’ case.”

So the Manhattan DA’s office thought it had a useless witness who would be dangerous to use in court, a bunch of supposedly improper acts for which they could find no victim, and a zombie. They’re in court this week on the zombie thing, with the useless witness.

After all of these people lose their jobs, they should face disbarment proceedings and criminal investigations.