Prosecutors worried they’d have to prove Donald Trump was not ‘legally …

Posted: February 7, 2023 at 6:44 am

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New York prosecutors feared they would have to prove that Donald Trump was not "legally insane" as they investigated his business practices, according to an upcoming memoir by a lead attorney on the team.

"To rebut the claim that Trump believed his own 'hype,' we would have to show, and stress, that Donald Trump was not legally insane," lawyer Mark Pomerantz writes in the memoir, seen by The Daily Beast.

"Was Donald Trump suffering from some sort of mental condition that made it impossible for him to distinguish between fact and fiction?" he queries in the book.

Pomerantz said that lawyers advising the Manhattan District Attorney'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."

Pomerantz, a former special assistant district attorney, was recruited by then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. to work on the criminal investigation into Trump and his family businesses. He joined the team in February 2021.

He and another lawyer Carey Dunne quit in protest a year later, with Pomerantz citing his frustration with Vance's successor Alvin Bragg Jr. indicating he had doubts about plans to indict Trump.

Bragg has since ramped up the investigation into Trump's businesses and has revived an investigation into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

The Daily Beast received an advance copy of the book "People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account," which is due to be released on Tuesday.

According to The Daily Beast, the book provides insight into how investigators put the case against Trump together and considered how to proceed with charging the former president.

In the book, Pomerantz says that he believes evidence proves Trump lied on financial documents and that he and Dunne believe this was the best way to prosecute Trump, according to The Daily Beast.

"The right way to proceed, we thought, was to bring felony charges based on the full panoply of false business records that Trump had helped to generate: the phony documents relating to the hush money payment and Michael Cohen's reimbursement, the false financial statements, the false accounting spreadsheets that were created to support the financial statements, and so forth," Pomerantz said.

In the book, Pomerantz also reportedly compares Trump to mob boss John Gotti, whose son Pomerantz once successfully prosecuted, according to The New York Times.

"He demanded absolute loyalty and would go after anyone who crossed him. He seemed always to stay one step ahead of the law," Pomerantz wrote of Trump.

"In my career as a lawyer, I had encountered only one other person who touched all of these bases: John Gotti, the head of the Gambino organized crime family."

A lawyer for Trump recently sent Pomerantz a letter threatening legal action over the book, according to The New York Times.

"If you publish such a book and continue making defamatory statements against my clients, my office will aggressively pursue all legal remedies," Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said.

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Prosecutors worried they'd have to prove Donald Trump was not 'legally ...

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