Former President Donald Trump attacked 60 Minutes for a segment that featured an interview with former US Attorney Mark Pomerantz, who was investigating alleged tax fraud by Trump and his company.
Pomerantz resigned from the Manhattan district attorney’s office last year over frustration that the investigation into alleged financial malfeasance was not aggressively pursued. Pomerantz has gone on record saying he thinks Trump is “guilty of numerous felonies, and has a new book out in which he reveals he pursued a racketeering case against the former president.
CBS’s correspondent Bill Whitaker interviewed Pomerantz, and the segment details the multiple claims of fraud Pomerantz lays out in his book, which is neatly summed up by the New York Times:
Donald J. Trump grew his business, fortune and fame “through a pattern of criminal activity,” according to a new book by a veteran prosecutor, who reveals that the Manhattan district attorney’s office once considered charging the former president with racketeering, a law often used against the Mafia.The prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, resigned in protest early last year after the newly elected district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump at that time. By then, the inquiry was more narrowly focused on whether the former president had fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure loans.But for months beforehand, Mr. Pomerantz had mapped out a wide-ranging possible case against the former president under the state racketeering law, according
to the soon-to-be published book, “People vs. Donald Trump.” That broader approach was based on the theory that Mr. Trump had presided over a corrupt business empire for years, a previously unreported aspect of the long-running inquiry.
A portion of the transcript from the interview via CBS News:
Mark Pomerantz: If you take the exact same conduct– and make it not about Donald Trump and not about a former president of the United States, would the case have been indicted? It would have been indicted in a flat second.Bill Whitaker: You said in your resignation letter that– Bragg’s decision amounted to– a grave failure of justice.Mark Pomerantz: Yes.Bill Whitaker: You still believe that?Mark Pomerantz: I still believe it.Bill Whitaker: But don’t prosecutors often disagree with decisions made by their bosses? I mean, what– what makes this different?Mark Pomerantz: given all the evidence that we had — nobody said, “Hey, the guy’s not guilty”
Sunday night on his Truth Social platform, Trump predictably blasted the segment as a “hit job” before suggesting nothing was wrong because “NOBODY WAS HURT!” Trump wrote:
The 60 Minutes “hit job” doesn’t say that the Financial Statements have a powerful & complete “Disclaimer Clause,” that the properties & assets are generally worth far more today than they were in the financial statement, that the most valuable asset is not even
listed in the statement, that lawyer Mark Pomerantz & his law firm were Clinton’s lawyers who then went to work for the D.A. to “get Trump,” that Pomerantz & his antics make it impossible for me to be treated fairly, & NOBODY WAS HURT!
Trump then turned to his favorite villain over the past eight years, Hillary Clinton…writing:
Crooked Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, radically deranged Mark Pomerantz, led the fake investigation into me and my business at the Manhattan D.A.’s Office and quit because D.A. Bragg, rightfully, wanted to drop the “weak” and “fatally flawed” case. Now, Pomerantz got himself a book deal, and is obsessively spreading falsehoods about me. With all of this vicious disinformation being revealed by a “prosecutor,” how can I ever be treated fairly in New York, or anywhere else? End the Witch Hunts!
So that’s that.
Watch above via CBS.