The Billion-Dollar Trump-Wall Street Mystery

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Welcome back to Dry Powder.

And thanks as always for following our work here at Puck.

In today’s email: What I’m hearing around Wall Street and the New York legal bar about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s confounding decision to effectively drop the grand jury investigation into Donald Trump.

My source close to the D.A.’s office believes the lead prosecutor on the case could have been able “to prove what he said he could prove.” Was it politics, or more prosaic concerns, that got in the way?

Enjoy,
Bill

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The Billion-Dollar Trump-Wall Street Mystery

Why did Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg apparently sideline an investigation into Trump’s business practices? And what might have happened, in a Vanceian era, had he not?

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Back in February, Wall Street and the legal bar experienced a collective shock wave of disbelief when Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne suddenly resigned, and, it seemed, in a huff. You may recall that former Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance hired Pomerantz, a revered prosecutor, last May as a “special assistant district attorney” to work with Dunne, Vance’s general counsel, to oversee the Manhattan D.A.’s criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s business practices. Vance, Pomerantz and Dunne were studying whether Trump had feloniously misled banks (in order to obtain loans) and taxing authorities (in order to evade taxes). The plot thickened, shortly thereafter, when The New York Times published Pomerantz’s resignation letter to Alvin Bragg, Vance’s successor as district attorney. It was a stunner, especially given the normally staid world of the white-shoe bar.

The resignations and the steamy resignation letter were prompted by Bragg’s surprising decision, six weeks after taking office, to pretty much drop the grand jury investigation into Trump and, with it, the possibility that his office would even try to prosecute the former president. Since then, Wall Street has been trying to figure out if Bragg really lost all confidence in his office’s ability to prosecute Trump successfully. Did he not want a political headache? Was this some weird belt-tightening exercise? Or did he simply think a case was a waste of time?

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