We recently noted that the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump’s business was crumbling after two prosecutors resigned. Now it’s becoming more clear what happened here.
Too many people didn’t believe the case was solid from the beginning.
The New York Times reports:
How the Manhattan D.A.’s Investigation Into Donald Trump UnraveledOn a late January afternoon, two senior prosecutors stood before the new Manhattan district attorney, hoping to persuade him to criminally charge the former president of the United States.The prosecutors, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, detailed their strategy for proving that Donald J. Trump knew his annual financial statements were works of fiction. Time was running out: The grand jury hearing evidence against Mr. Trump was set to expire in the spring. They needed the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to decide whether to seek charges.But Mr. Bragg and his senior aides, masked and gathered around a conference table on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan, had serious doubts. They hammered Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne about whether they could show that Mr. Trump had intended to break the law by inflating the value of his assets in the annual statements, a necessary element to prove the case.The questioning was so intense that as the meeting ended, Mr. Dunne, exasperated, used a lawyerly expression that normally refers to a judge’s fiery questioning:“Wow, this was a really hot bench,” Mr. Dunne said, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. “What I’m hearing is you have great concerns.”
The two prosecutors who resigned recently were not the only ones to do so. The Times report continues:
Mr. Bragg was not the only one to question the strength of the case, the interviews show. Late last year, three career prosecutors in the district attorney’s office opted to leave the investigation, uncomfortable with the speed at which it was proceeding and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence. The tension spilled into the new administration, with some career prosecutors raising concerns directly to the new district attorney’s team.
The full NY Times report is here.
The Daily Mail points out that the case felt “rushed” to some and prosecutors were also struggling because Trump doesn’t like to use email:
…Bragg – sworn into office on January 1 – halted the case because his own team couldn’t convince him that Trump had inflated the value of his assets to gain more favorable loan terms on purpose, according to The New York Times.He was unconvinced that the probe could prove Trump had a criminal intent when doing so, with the president repeatedly denying claims of wrongdoing.A key issue is thought to have been Trump’s dislike of email. The former president is known to prefer meeting contacts in person, or calling them up, making it far harder to identify any paper trail of alleged criminality…The probe was kicked-off by Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance, who is said to have pushed for the probe to be rapidly-advanced in the final days of his time in office.But that behavior is said to have spooked Bragg, who felt a rushed case had more chance of failing. Separate controversies about Bragg’s plans to avoid sending suspected petty criminals to jail, and a spate of violent crimes in New York, are further said to have taken his eye off the Trump case, leading to its failure.
This was nothing more than impeachment 3.0, and too many people involved knew it.
Democrats and the media are obsessed with disqualifying Trump from another run for office. At the end of the day, this case had nothing.
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