‘His empire was built on lies’: Former Manhattan attorney claims criminal charges should be brought against Trump
Conrad Hoyt
A former Manhattan special assistant district attorney said Sunday that criminal charges should be brought against former President Donald Trump for financial crimes and if the case weren’t about a former president, “…it would have been indicted in a flat second.”
Mark Pomerantz investigated Trump’s annual financial statements and accounting documents from 2011-2020 and said he and his team concluded Trump had lied about his assets to appear wealthier than he was in order to obtain multimillion-dollar favorable bank loans to expand his real estate empire.
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Pomerantz was on CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday night promoting his book, People vs. Donald Trump. The former Manhattan attorney was a part of then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s team investigating Trump and said that he convinced Vance to authorize presenting the evidence to a grand jury.
However, according to Pomerantz, when Alvin Bragg was sworn in as the new Manhattan district attorney, Pomerantz’s team was stopped from seeking an indictment of Trump. Pomerantz said he still believes Bragg’s decision not to prosecute Trump is a grave failure of justice.
“Nobody said, ‘hey the guy’s not guilty,'” Pomerantz noted as a reason Trump should have been prosecuted, saying the team he worked with all agreed and had “many bits and pieces of evidence on which we could relay in making that case.”
Pomerantz claimed Trump used the money he obtained through the favorable bank loans to buy, refinance, and renovate properties, such as the Trump National Doral in Miami, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, and the old post office property in Washington, D.C.
According to documents Pomerantz shared with 60 Minutes, the accounting documents Trump submitted to banks valued Mar-a-Lago at $739 million in 2018, but New York Attorney General Letitia James’s conclusion was that the property was only worth $75 million, almost ten times less. James filed a lawsuit against Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization in September 2022 for fraud.
In additional alleged improper evaluations, Trump valued his Westchester County, New York, property Seven Springs at $161 million in 2014, but Pomerantz claimed that Trump’s own appraiser months earlier valued it at between $29 million and $50 million.
Pomerantz said the investigation found that the financial statements submitted by Trump to banks in those years were overstated by billions of dollars and that he inflated the value of his properties, and even enlarged the size of his condominiums to boost his net worth.
“His empire was built on lies,” Pomerantz told 60 Minutes’s Bill Whitaker. The former Manhattan attorney said Trump drastically inflated the value of his properties, Mar-a-Lago, 40 Wall Street, etc., in order to bolster his net worth.
Trump has accused James’s case against him of being politically driven. He has also denied wrongdoing. However, he dropped two lawsuits against her last month in which he challenged her investigation into him, his family, and his organization.
Pomerantz said that for each of the major properties Trump overvalued, he “claimed to have a value that was more than anybody had ever bought or sold a private residence for in the United States ever.”
In a statement to 60 Minutes, Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina said Pomerantz is “…falsely accusing Trump of committing felonies to sell a book.”
Pomerantz was, and is still, intent on bringing charges against Trump. But when Bragg was sworn in as the new Manhattan district attorney, everything changed.
When Pomerantz learned that Bragg was reportedly concerned about the strength of the case against Trump and that the investigation would slow down, Pomerantz and Carrie Dunn, the office’s general counsel, resigned. Bragg won a tax fraud case in December against the Trump Organization, but he didn’t charge Trump.
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Pomerantz believes his case should still be launched and though he has not spoken with Bragg, would tell him this if he got the chance: “This was a righteous case. You should bring it. It’s important. And if you made the wrong decision, make a better decision.”
Bragg told 60 Minutes in a statement that he agreed with senior prosecutors in the office that they needed to investigate further.