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NYC prosecutors feared they'd have to prove Trump wasn't legally insane in fraud case, book says [1]

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Date: 2023-02-04  

In a new book, a former Manhattan prosecutor who led the criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s business activities says the district attorney’s office had to consider whether the former president was a criminal mastermind or legally insane.

The Daily Beast and other news outlets received an advance copy on Friday of ex-prosecutor Mark Pomerantz’s book, People vs. Donald Trump: An Insider Account . The book is due out on Tuesday.

In February 2021, Pomerantz came out of semi-retirement and was tasked by then-New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to head the investigation into Trump’s life and business.

In December 2021, Vance Jr. authorized Pomerantz to present evidence to a grand jury and seek an indictment of Trump and others. Pomerantz writes that his team agreed that Trump should be indicted for falsifying records by inflating the value of assets on financial statements he provided to lenders.

However, Vance’s successor Alvin Bragg, who took office in January 2022, expressed reservations about the strength of the evidence and the credibility of a key witness, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen. Bragg decided not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time, according to Pomerantz.

Pomerantz and his associate, Carey Dunne, resigned from the district attorney’s office on February 23, 2022. In his resignation letter, Pomerantz said Bragg’s decision was “on the wrong side of history.”

In his book, Pomerantz details the kind of obstacles his team had to overcome to build an unprecedented criminal case against an ex-president.

The Daily Beast cites this excerpt from Pomerantz’s book:

“To rebut the claim that Trump believed his own ‘hype’… we would have to show, and stress, that Donald Trump was not legally insane,” Pomerantz wrote. “Was Donald Trump suffering from some sort of mental condition that made it impossible for him to distinguish between fact and fiction?” he asked, noting that a group of high-powered lawyers advising the DA’s office “discussed whether Trump had been spewing bullshit for so many years about so many things that he could no longer process the difference between bullshit and reality.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/4/2151071/-NYC-prosecutors-feared-they-d-have-to-prove-Trump-wasn-t-legally-insane-in-tax-case-book-says

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