Trump, Having Defeated Jack Smith, Sets His Sights on Maverick Prosecutor Who Helped Alvin Bragg

A new target of President Trump’s campaign of retribution is emerging alongside his bête noire, Special Counsel Jack Smith — the maverick lawyer Mark Pomerantz.Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Pomerantz, who once worked in District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, during his speech on Friday at the Department of Justice. The 47th president denounced those who “prosecuted my family, staff, and supporters, raided my home at Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States, with the help of radicals like … Mark Pomerantz.”That rhetoric has been followed by an executive order, “Addressing Risks From Paul Weiss,” that takes aim at Mr. Pomerantz’s employer, one of New York City’s most renowned law firms that was last year named “Firm of the Year” by both the American Law Journal and the New York Law Journal. The order, whose sanctions and penalties mirror those enshrined in similar edicts against Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling, notes, “In 2022, Paul Weiss hired unethical attorney Mark Pomerantz, who had previously left Paul Weiss to join the Manhattan District Attorney’s office solely to manufacture a prosecution against me.”The order commands Attorney General Bondi and other high officials to “suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at Paul Weiss and Mark Pomerantz,” reasoning, “After being unable to convince even Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that a fraud case was feasible, Pomerantz engaged in a media campaign to gin up support for this unwarranted prosecution.” Mr. Pomerantz is not currently with the firm. Mr. Pomerantz, who clerked for Justice Potter Stewart on the Supreme Court, was “of counsel” to the litigation department at Paul Weiss when, in 2021, he departed the firm to join Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., as a special assistant district attorney to investigate Mr. Trump. In 2022, though, Mr. Pomerantz resigned alongside another prosecutor, Carey Dunne, after it became clear — for the moment — that Mr. Bragg was not going to pursue a prosecution of Mr. Trump. Mr. Pomerantz, in a resignation letter he made public, declared that he had adduced “evidence sufficient to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and that “the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump.”Mr. Pomerantz’s letter added, “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, now to become a passive participant in what I believe to be a grave failure of justice,” meaning Mr. Bragg’s reluctance to charge Mr. Trump. In February 2023 he codified his experiences in a book, “The People v. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.” Mr. Bragg sought to delay its publication, arguing that Mr. Pomerantz “has neither sought nor received approval to make disclosures relating to ongoing matters at the DA’s office.”Mr. Bragg was not alone in seeing Mr. Pomernatz’s book as a breach. The president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, J. Anthony Jordan, reckoned, “By writing and releasing a book in the midst of an ongoing case, the author is upending the norms and ethics of prosecutorial conduct and is potentially in violation of New York criminal law.”Some three months after Mr. Pomerantz’s book was published, Mr. Bragg changed course and charged Mr. Trump with 34 counts of falsification of business records in connection to payments to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels. Mr. Pomerantz’s book argues that Mr. Trump’s “approach to business had much in common with the business practices of another well-known public figure—former mob boss John J. Gotti.”Mr. Trump threatened to sue Mr. Pomerantz and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, over that comparison as well as the lawyer’s argument that Mr. Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations” and that it was a “grave failure of justice” not to hold him “accountable by way of criminal prosecution.” Mr. Pomerantz was hauled before the House Judiciary Committee, where he refused to answer a single question. The case that Mr. Pomerantz pushed Messrs. Vance and Bragg to prosecute was not the one that ultimately led to the convictions secured by Mr. Bragg. It bore a greater resemblance to the civil fraud suit brought by Attorney General Letitia James, who persuaded Judge Arthur Engoron to impose a penalty of more than $450 million on Mr. Trump’s business and stiff sanctions on the ability of him and his two eldest sons to do business in New York.Mr. Trump has appealed that ruling, and he could do the same to one issued last week by Judge Beryl Howell in respect of the executive order against Perkins. She determined that some of the punitive measures in that order run “head on into the wall of First Amendment protections” and that the “order casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportions across the legal profession.” Similar judicial resistance to this order could emerge. The Sun reached out to both Mr. Pomerantz and Paul Weiss for comment.

Trump, Having Defeated Jack Smith, Sets His Sights on Maverick Prosecutor Who Helped Alvin Bragg

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