The Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has sued Republican representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, in an extraordinary step intended to keep congressional Republicans from interfering in the office’s criminal case against former president Donald Trump.
The 50-page suit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, accuses Mr Jordan of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on the prosecution of Mr Trump and a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” on the district attorney. Mr Bragg last week unveiled 34 felony charges against Mr Trump that stem from the former president’s attempts to cover up a potential sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign.
Lawyers for Mr Bragg are seeking to bar Mr Jordan and his congressional allies from enforcing a subpoena sent to Mark Pomerantz, who was once a leader of the district attorney’s Trump investigation and who later wrote a book about that experience. Mr Pomerantz resigned early last year after Mr Bragg, just weeks into his first term in office, decided not to seek an indictment of Trump at that time.
Mr Bragg’s lawyers also intend to prevent any other such subpoenas, the lawsuit says. Mr Jordan has left open the possibility of subpoenaing Mr Bragg.
Gerry Thornley: Ireland’s fitful displays made for a rather disconcerting month
Nil Yalter: Solo Exhibition – A fascinating glimpse of a historically influential artist
Katie McCabe and Ireland fully focused on their qualification goal ahead of Wales match
A Californian woman in Dublin: ‘Ireland’s not perfect, but I do think as a whole it is moving in the right direction’
“Rather than allowing the criminal process to proceed in the ordinary course, Chairman Jordan and the committee are participating in a campaign of intimidation, retaliation and obstruction,” the suit said, adding that the district attorney’s office had received more than 1,000 calls and emails from Mr Trump’s supporters — many of them “threatening and racially charged” — since the former president predicted his own arrest last month.
Mr Jordan responded in a statement on Twitter.
“First, they indict a president for no crime,” he wrote. “Then, they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds they say they used to do it.”
On Tuesday afternoon, the judge in the case, Mary Kay Vyskocil, declined to issue a temporary restraining order that had been proposed by Mr Bragg’s lawyers, which would have prohibited any enforcement of the subpoena sent to Mr Pomerantz. Instead, she ordered that Mr Jordan’s lawyers respond by April 17 and scheduled a hearing in the case for April 19, the day that Mr Jordan’s committee had set for Mr Pomerantz’s deposition.
Last month, Mr Jordan, in his role as the House Judiciary Committee chair, sent letters with two Republican colleagues that demanded the district attorney’s office provide communications, documents and testimony about Mr Bragg’s investigation of Trump. In the letters, the Republican lawmakers defended their right to conduct oversight of the case.
And after Mr Bragg’s prosecutors unveiled the charges against Mr Trump last week, Mr Jordan issued the subpoena to Mr Pomerantz, seeking to compel a closed-door deposition.
In response to the letters’ focus on federal funds, the district attorney’s office said that it had spent about $5,000 worth of federal money on investigations into Mr Trump and his company between October 2019 and August 2021, most of it on litigation related to a court battle with Mr Trump over access to his tax returns.
In a statement Tuesday, Mr Bragg said that the subpoena to Mr Pomerantz was “an unconstitutional attempt to undermine an ongoing New York felony criminal prosecution and investigation.”
Mr Pomerantz is also named as a defendant in the suit, though that appears to be a formality. By naming him, Mr Bragg’s lawyers are seeking to block Mr Pomerantz from testifying if he was legally compelled to do so. Mr Pomerantz has shown no indication that he is willing to testify voluntarily. He declined to comment on Tuesday.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.