Trump should have been charged with crimes, former New York

A former special New York prosecutor who quit a criminal investigation of ex-President Donald Trump after his boss declined to lodge charges at the time said that if Trump “had been Joe Blow from Kokomo, we would have indicted without a big debate.”

“I believe that Donald Trump, in fact, was guilty and, second, that there was sufficient evidence as a matter of law to have sustained a guilty verdict if we went forward,” said Mark Pomerantz, the former special prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, in a new interview.

“My view is that it is toxic to have people believe that the criminal justice system is unable to hold people accountable if those people have huge financial and political influence,” Pomerantz said.

“The rule of law is supposed to extend to the rich and poor alike, to the vulnerable, to the powerful,” he added.

Pomerantz made the comments on the podcast, “Why Wasn’t Donald Trump Criminally Prosecuted in New York? What Happened and Why?” hosted by Columbia University Law School Professor John Coffee Jr.

Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jed Rakoff participated in the interview.

The interview, released Thursday, was Pomerantz’s first since he and Carey Dunne, another prosecutor with whom he had been spearheading the criminal probe of Trump, resigned from the Manhattan DA’s Office in February over the decision by DA Alvin Bragg Jr. not to seek a grand jury indictment of Trump for the moment.

“You know, I believed very deeply in the notion that it’s a government of laws and not men, and that means the rule of law is for everybody,” Pomerantz said.

“And I was utterly convinced that if the defendant had not been Donald Trump or the putative defendant, if it had been Joe Blow from Kokomo, we would have indicted without a big debate,” he said.

“You don’t give fabricated financial statements to banks to get loans without running the risk that you’re going to get charged with a crime,” Pomerantz added.

The DA’s office was known to be investigating Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, for possible crimes related to the suspected practice of reporting different valuations for the same real estate assets, depending on the circumstances, in order to maximize financial benefits in the form of tax breaks, insurance premium reductions and the value of loans.

New York state Attorney General Letitia James’s office is conducting a civil investigation of the Trump Organization for the same issues.

“We anticipated the ability to elicit testimony that those loans would not have been made, except for the fact that Donald Trump gave the banks personal financial statements and attested to their accuracy,” Pomerantz said in the interview.

Trump and his lawyers have denied he and the company committed wrongdoing.

Trump’s attorney, Ronald Fischetti, did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment. But Fischetti previously has told CNBC that he was “surprised” and…