NYC prosecutor who quit over Donald Trump probe says a January 6 indictment is risky but vital — like 'cancer surgery'

• A Manhattan prosecutor who resigned over failure to indict Donald Trump calls January 6 facts 'quite damning.'
• Mark Pomerantz likened any January 6 prosecution of Trump to 'cancer surgery' — risky but urgent.

A Manhattan prosecutor who resigned in protest when his office failed to indict Donald Trump on financial charges thinks a January 6 prosecution would be a simpler, "easier" case to win — and as risky and vital as "cancer surgery."

"The facts seem quite damning," Mark Pomerantz said this week, speaking on Columbia University Law School's new 'The Cutting Edge' podcast.

"There's no evidence of any large-scale voter fraud, yet you have the repetition of the big lie that Donald Trump won the election," Pomerantz said, according to a transcript posted by Columbia.

"You have proof of efforts to intimidate state election officials, efforts to concoct slates of phony electors, efforts to suborn the vice president, even expressing support for the people who were clamoring to hang him," he said in the podcast, which was taped in late June.

Trump also leaned on Justice Department officials "to support the false claim of corrupt voting practices," Pomerantz said. On January 6 itself, Trump tried to join the mob and then refused to call off demonstrators for three hours, Pomerantz noted.

"So you put all that together. Does it look like an illegal effort to obstruct the orderly transfer of presidential power? Is that a crime?" the ex-prosecutor rhetorically asked his host, law professor John C. Coffee Jr. and his fellow guest, Jed Rakoff, a senior US District Judge based in Manhattan.

"I'm not going to express a view," Pomerantz told them, "but you probably kind of know what view I'm yearning to express."

Pomerantz and attorney Carey Dunne, who led the DA's three-year probe into Trump's alleged financial crimes, resigned abruptly in February.

Pomerantz said in a later-revealed resignation letter to their boss, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, that the team that investigated Trump believed beyond a doubt that the former president is guilty of "numerous" felonies.

The ex-prosecutor said he still believes that. And in his most expansive remarks on the DA's Trump probe yet, he added that he thinks the probability of Trump being convicted of financial crimes "was more than 50 percent — and by a healthy margin."

But when Bragg took office in January, he and his new team quickly focused on the risk of losing, Pomerantz said on the podcast.

"It was a hugely complicated set of facts," he said of the allegations that had been developed under the outgoing DA, Cyrus Vance. He also suggested that Bragg and his new team did not have, or take, the time to fully absorb the probe's intricacies.

The DA's investigation — and a parallel civil probe by Attorney General Letitia James — was looking at alleged misstatements in a decade's worth of Trump Organization financial documents used to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans and tax breaks.

"It's very hard to take somebody who has not been exposed to those facts on a trip through the capillaries of the financial statements in a meeting or even a meeting or two," Pomerantz said.

Any federal January 6 prosecution of Trump will be "certainly more politically fraught" than a New York financial crimes prosecution would have been, he added.

"You know, Merrick Garland, as the attorney general, is a member of the administration, and the question is whether to indict the main political rival of the head of the administration. That is not something that Cy Vance or Alvin Bragg had to worry about," he said.

"I think legally, it's complicated, because Trump had powers as president and First Amendment rights. Was he inciting a riot on January 6 or rallying his political supporters?

"Those are issues that are perhaps unique to the circumstances. Having said all that, factually, it could well be an easier case," Pomerantz said.

And it's even more important, he said.

"For me, the conduct of usurping the electoral process, if it can be proved, is like a cancer on the body politic," he said.

"The cancer has to be exposed and treated. And a prosecution is like cancer surgery. It's risky, it may not succeed, it creates risks, it may even kill the patient.

"But my view is the conduct has already sickened the country, and if the facts are there, I don't think there's an option not to bring the case."

Otherwise, "the public comes to believe that Donald Trump — who has a lifetime of experience of dancing between the raindrops of accountability — that he's in a special category and somehow he always finds a way.

"And I think that does violence to public confidence in the rule of law."