Former Manhattan prosecutor to testify before House committee

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has reached an agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, whom it is investigating, to allow a former prosecutor from that office to testify in a Congressional probe into the indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Attorneys for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, and the ex-prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, informed a federal appeals court Friday evening that they had reached an agreement which will allow Pomerantz to go forward with the testimony. The committee said in a tweet that the testimony is scheduled for May 12.

Bragg’s office had appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Wednesday evening after a federal judge rejected his attempt to block the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of Pomerantz.

The judge, Mary Kay Vyskocil, concluded earlier that day that she has no standing to block the subpoena. Jordan and the committee have aggressively confronted Bragg in the weeks since Trump was indicted late last month. 

Jordan and Trump have claimed that the case brought by Bragg, a Democrat, is motivated by political retribution. On April 4, Trump entered a not guilty plea to 34 felony counts of falsification of business records.

Pomerantz resigned from the Manhattan D.A.’s office in February 2022 after working on the Trump investigation for a year, and  subsequently penned a memoir about the job. 

Matthew Berry, an attorney for the committee, said during a court hearing Wednesday that Pomerantz was subpoenaed as part of an effort to determine how much federal funding was used in the Manhattan probe, and if politics came into play during the investigation.