House Judiciary Committee subpoenas former prosecutor in Manhattan DA’s Trump probe

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday issued a subpoena demanding congressional testimony from Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office who worked on the hush money probe of former President Trump.

It is the first subpoena the panel has issued related to its investigation of Mr. Trump’s arrest on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, said earlier this week that a subpoena of Mr. Bragg is also on the table, but has not yet been issued.

Mr. Jordan last month requested Mr. Pomerantz testify before the panel. Mr. Pomerantz’s attorney responded to the request saying that his client would not cooperate in the investigation at the direction of Mr. Bragg’s office, according to a letter by Mr. Jordan accompanying the subpoena.

Mr. Jordan said that left him no choice but to subpoena the former prosecutor to answer questions about political bias in Mr. Bragg’s decision to charge the former president.

“Congress has a specific and manifestly important interest in preventing politically motivated prosecution of current and former presidents by elected state and local prosecutors,” Mr. Jordan wrote. “If state or local prosecutors are able to engage in politically motivated prosecutions of Presidents of the United States (current or former) for personal acts, this could have a profound impact on how presidents choose to exercise their powers in office.”

Mr. Pomerantz wrote a book about the Trump investigation in which he said he quit the probe because Mr. Bragg was reluctant to bring charges.

Mr. Pomerantz and another prosecutor, Carey Dunne, oversaw the hush money probe and pushed for criminal charges against Mr. Trump. Last month, Mr. Pomerantz released a book arguing that criminal charges were warranted and former District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. had authorized him to pursue Mr. Trump’s indictment.

Although Mr. Vance abandoned the hush money probe in 2019, shifting the investigation into other financial concerns, Mr. Pomerantz sought to resurrect it in January 2021 maintaining there was evidence Mr. Trump committed serious crimes.

In his letter, Mr. Jordan described the book as an effort to pressure Mr. Bragg into resurrecting a case that had been rejected by Mr. Vance and the Justice Department. He also wrote that the book is evidence of a political motivation to target Mr. Trump.

Mr. Pomerantz wrote in his book that he was “delighted” to join the Trump investigation, joking that he would have paid Mr. Bragg to work on the case. He describes Mr. Trump as a “malignant narcissist” and suggests that he might be a “megalomaniac who posed a real danger to the country.”

Mr. Jordan said such writings underscore the prosecutors’ zeal to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.

“In other words, as a special assistant district attorney, you seem for reasons unrelated to the facts of this particular investigation to have been searching for any basis on which to bring criminal charges,” he wrote.