House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) escalated Republicans’ investigation into the Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of former President Donald Trump by subpoenaing a prosecutor on Thursday who resigned from the office last year over the district attorney’s initial reluctance to pursue Trump’s case.
Jordan’s subpoena, reviewed by Breitbart News, directs Mark Pomerantz, who resigned from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in February 2022, to appear before the committee for a deposition on April 20.
In a cover letter accompanying the subpoena, Jordan said his committee had legislative reasons to demand Pomerantz’s testimony.
“Congress has a specific and manifestly important interest in preventing politically motivated prosecutions of current and former Presidents by elected state and local prosecutors, particularly in jurisdictions—like New York County—where the prosecutor is popularly elected and trial-level judges lack life tenure,” Jordan wrote.
Read the cover letter below:
Pomerantz, a former special assistant assigned to the years-long Trump case, exited the Manhattan district attorney’s office right after Bragg took over. The move became a public affair when his resignation letter appeared in the New York Times last March.
Pomerantz wrote in the letter to Bragg that he believed Trump was “guilty of numerous felony violations” related to his financial statements and that he was quitting because he thought Bragg’s decision at the time to “indefinitely” suspend the investigation into Trump was “misguided.”
Mark Pomerantz, author of People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account, appears on Meet the Press in Washington, DC, February 12, 2023. (William B. Plowman/NBC via Getty Images)
Jordan observed, based on the resignation letter, that Pomerantz had “prejudged the results” of the investigation and that his critical words of Bragg seemingly sparked the district attorney to openly declare that the Trump investigation was “far from over.”
In November 2022, one week after Trump announced he was running for president again, the Times reported that Bragg had revived the Trump investigation and had zeroed in on a hush money scheme involving porn star Stormy Daniels and Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen.
“For Mr. Bragg, the hush-money developments suggest the first signs of progress since he took office at the beginning of the year, when he balked at indicting Mr. Trump in connection with his business practices,” the outlet reported at the time.
Pomerantz later went on to publish a book about the matter, called People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account, in which Pomerantz discussed internal concerns people had about the investigation and worries about the credibility of Cohen, a convicted felon.
“You describe your eagerness to investigate President Trump, writing that you were ‘delighted’ to join an unpaid group of lawyers advising on the Trump investigations, and joking that salary negotiations had gone ‘great’ because you would have paid to join the investigation,” Jordan wrote of the book.
He added that Pomerantz “frivolously” compared Trump to John Gotti, a notorious New York City mob boss, and described him as a “malignant narcissist.”
“The depth of your personal animosity towards him is apparent in your writing,” Jordan concluded.
The subpoena marks Republicans’ strongest move yet in their investigation of the New York County’s indictment of Trump amid questions from some about Congress’s authority to probe open state-level criminal matters.
It comes after Jordan first contacted Pomerantz on March 22 seeking his testimony, as well as documents and communication related to the Trump investigation.
Jordan in his subpoena cover letter referenced correspondence on March 25 from Bragg to Pomerantz, which Breitbart News has reviewed, in which Bragg instructed Pomerantz, a private citizen, not to provide Congress with any materials relevant to Pomerantz’s work at the district attorney’s office.
Pomerantz then told the committee on March 27 that he would be complying with Bragg’s instructions rather than Jordan’s requests.
Jordan contended Thursday, however, that Pomerantz is “uniquely situated” to provide insight to the Judiciary Committee and that he has “no basis to decline to testify” given he has already made detailed accounts of his work on the Trump probe widely public.
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com. Follow her on Twitter at @asholiver.