it s 4:00 in new york on a monday. an empire built on lies. that is how one veteran prosecutor describes the twice impeached disgraced ex-president s family business. the trump organization. it is the linchpin of the image of a successful businessman that donald trump sold to his voters for years. but those are the words of mark pomerantz. you re going the hear a lot about him in the coming days. he is a former prosecutor for the manhattan district attorney s office, a man who spent a year poring over financial statements from the ex-president s businesses and interviewing potential witnesses about them. he came to one inescapable conclusion, that donald trump committed financial crimes. here is what he said to cbs news about his boss, manhattan d.a. alvin bragg s decision to halt the grand jury probe that was looking into trump s finances, a decision that led pomerantz to resign in protest. if you take the exact same conduct and make it not about donald trump and not about
this in his book about the office he quit in protest. quote, as i saw it, the doubters had not been e-merced in the statement of financial condition fact gathering and they did not know the case well. also, they seemed to be exactly the kind of traditional let s do the things the way we have always done them that kept the district attorney s office from being more successful in white collar cases. cy vance had privately complained many times to me and carey about the gun-shy culture in the office, saying that even he as district attorney had not always been able to crack through it. let me play this too. these are a handful of the people who have investigated donald trump s criminality and come out saying crimes happened. if we had had confidence that the president clearly had not committed a crime, we would have
donald j. trump as tipped off by the italians. i think the public is at this inflection point, and i m reluctant to even cover people who write about crimes they saw when they looked into trump, because i think the public is really starting to wonder if anyone has the you know whats to do anything about it. what do you think? i think if anybody has the you know whats to do it, it is this administration and this attorney general. because i don t think if we go another two, three, four years, whoever that next administration is, that just by the age of the case, by people s memories fading, there is not going to be a better time than now. to the point of like the additional alleged criminal activity, what was it? financial crime relating to donald trump. it all comes back to financial crime relating to donald trump. that s all it is. that was his red line to mueller. you look into my finances, that s offlimits. it s all about the financial crime. and that s why i m glad susanne and her
interviewed witnesses found evidence of criminality. and allen bragg, who is pushing back in a suspiciously vigorous manner said no he didn t. but what you re talking about last week is allen bragg perhaps bringing these cases after all. tell me what s going on. right. in the case that s going forward, they re looking at the hush money payments to stormy daniels, and that sort of seems to be now where the focus. i don t see it. and i kind of keep waiting, but so far we haven t seen them move on the issue of the appraisals, submitting false information to financial institutions in order to get a loan. and that s where mark pomerantz so far, we ve heard him go quite strongly. i can t wait to read the book to see what else potentially is in there. that has been an area of focus for him. he felt it was a pretty slam-dunk case, and then the attorney general of new york bringing a civil case with very similar characteristics to the
when she goes to sleep than i ll ever know about his finances, but you have another career prosecutor saying if he was anyone else, he d be charged. what is happening? well, i think, nicolle, that s a source of immense frustration with a lot of the american public, when they hear all these potential alleged crimes and it sure looks like there is a separate system of justice for somebody who is powerful and somebody who is well connected, somebody who is wealthy. i think two things when you get to trump. the first thing is he has for all those people who are saying crimes were committed, he has people like bill barr. he has people in the extremes of the republican party who are defending him, who are throwing sand in the wheels of justice, who are making it very hard to bring a case. he also has the fact that he has an enormously complex financial reality. the trump organization is not one man with a couple of retirement accounts, two bank accounts, and a slush fund that he keeps unde