Former special assistant to the district attorney, Mark Pomerantz disputes claims that the information he has detailed in his book is of such importance that it could destroy any potential case against former President Donald Trump.
Speaking to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday night, Pomerantz said that on all of these issues "the cat is out of the bag." In fact, he added, "those cats have been running all over the place literally for years."
"The legal issue that I've noted in the book is an issue that appears on the face of the statute," he explained. "It's already been written about, was written about before my book has come out. On the financial statement side of the coin, we don't know -- I certainly don't know what investigation is taking place, if any. I don't know whether charges will ultimately be brought. What I do know is that the evidence underlying the charges we intended to bring is already out there in the public record."
He explained that the civil case brought by Attorney General Letitia James filed is well over 200 pages of financial details that have been reported.
It "lays out in abundant detail the assets that were misvalued, the basis for the overvaluation of the assets," said Pomerantz. "That is how she concluded and why she concluded that the assets were overvalued. And the evidence that we were looking at in connection with a potential criminal case has been laid out in chapter and verse in that complaint. And, again, there is nothing in my book about the financial statement investigation that -- the criminal investigation — that we were doing. There are no new facts that don't appear in the attorney general's complaint."
He said that it was important to him, in writing the book, not to interfere with any potential prosecution. After all, he explained, the purpose of the book was to encourage further prosecution he thinks should still be pursued.
At one point, Pomerantz described a woefully inadequate district attorney's office trying to do the work that he thought the federal government should be doing.
Maddow said that what Americans have learned since then is that the Justice Department was putting a lot of pressure on the Southern District of New York not to touch any investigations into Trump. It left the Manhattan DA's office and the New York attorney general as the only ones able to do the investigations. Since, however, the DOJ has been taken over by someone else and it's possible that they could be doing the same kind of investigation that Pomerantz thinks the DA should have been doing all along.
See the full conversation below or at the link here:
Pomerantz 3 www.youtube.com
A 2018 letter from then-Acting Director of the Office of Government Ethics David Apol to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
