Corruption is the Way of the Manhattan DA
We’ve got a new District Attorney in New York City – but it’s the same old story of entrenched corruption and impunity for criminal elites! Last month, new DA Alvin Bragg decided not to pursue the prosecution of Trump for obvious crimes, and last week, lawyer Mark Pomerantz, who had come out of retirement to aid then-DA Cy Vance in the Trump Crime Cult investigation, published a blistering resignation letter in which he blamed Bragg for stopping the investigation in its tracks. What Pomerantz failed to mention was that Vance had spent his entire tenure protecting criminal elites – including the Trump family! – while lawyers in the know like Pomerantz said nothing until it was too late. Bragg did not create these problems; he inherited them. But now it is Bragg’s job to fix them, and he seems more content to be the fall guy than to act.
This episode is a deep dive into the shady world of the Manhattan DA’s office, focusing mainly on Cy Vance and all the crimelords he let off, from Weinstein to Epstein to the Trumps to Bannon to Manafort. Sarah discusses how letting these operatives go free not only endangers the United States, but the entire world, particularly since so many are tied to Russia as Russia brutally invades a sovereign country that it sees as its first stop to a broader imperial conquest. If only the strong words that Biden accidentally uttered in his “gaffe” about Putin – the “gaffe” that righteously condemned a war criminal and therefore upset the DC establishment – were used to describe domestic threats as well.
For our Patreon bonus episode, available to subscribers at the Truth-Teller level or higher, we are airing the live Q & A special with our beloved listeners that we held last week. This was the first Gaslit Nation live event but it will not be the last! We plan to do this again over the summer so sign up at the Democracy Defender level or higher to join the Gaslit Nation Zoom Party! In this week’s bonus we discuss Ukraine, voting rights, the midterms, Eric Greitens the serial abuser Senate candidate and more. We thank you for your continued support of our extremely independent show!
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President Joe Biden:
Putin has the gall to say he's “denazifying” Ukraine. It's a lie. It's just cynical. He knows that. And it's also obscene. President Zelensky was democratically elected. He's Jewish. His father's family was wiped out in Nazi Holocaust. And Putin has the audacity, like all other autocrats before him, to believe that might will make right. So in this hour, let the words of Pope John Paul burn as brightly today: Never, ever give up hope. Never doubt. Never tire. Never become discouraged. Be not afraid. A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase a people's love for liberty. Brutality will never grind down their will to be free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness. We will have a different future, a brighter future rooted in democracy and principle, hope and light, of decency and dignity, of freedom and possibilities. For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.
[intro theme music]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kenzior, the author of the best sellers, The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight and of the upcoming book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent, which is available for preorder now. And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world. So today is a first in the history of Gaslit Nation. My co-host, Andrea Chalupa, will not be with us today. [cue battle snare drums] From what I can tell, she's on a mysterious mission for regime change in Russia as commanded by President Joe Biden, who you heard in the intro of the show. Andrea heard Biden’s stirring words and just could not stop herself. She had to fulfill this mission once and for all. [end battle snare drums] I'm kidding. This is not why she's [not] here, though I look forward to what I just said getting played on right wing outlets out of context.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, Andrea's not here today but she was here to record a mega Q&A for our Patreon subscribers so if you would like to hear Andrea's take on Ukraine, global kleptocracy, enduring corruption and the other fun topics that we cover regularly, please sign up on Gaslit Nation’s Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher. If you'd like to submit a question, please sign up at the Democracy Defender level or higher. Andrea and I actually recorded multiple bonus Q&A episodes yesterday. We got through dozens of questions sent in by our listeners and you will get to hear those over the next two weeks as well. You can also find out where Andrea really is by subscribing at the absolute highest Patreon level possible. Kidding, kidding. I'm gonna stop that now and get on with the show.
Sarah Kendzior:
As you may have inferred, I am hosting this show all alone today and while I miss my buddy, I have plenty to say myself. Last week was a week of horrific confirmation of what we already knew: that Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is an insurrectionist who abetted the plot to destroy American democracy in late 2020 and early 2021 in the attempted coup. We “learned” that the Democrats remain feckless and are doing little about this other than politely asking Thomas to recuse himself from coup cases. And I'm sorry, when you have coup cases as a future offering to the Supreme Court (if we're lucky), your country's not in good shape. We found out yet again that Merrick Garland is still refusing to prosecute criminal elites, to the point where members of the January 6th Committee are now publicly criticizing him for that refusal, although to be honest with you, I don't fully trust that those critiques are sincere since the January 6th Committee itself took so long to form, has held only one hearing, and as I mentioned in last week's episode, is being guided by Trump crime cult associate Jamie Gorelick, a lifelong mentor and friend to Merrick Garland who is also Jared and Ivanka's ethics lawyer.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, Jared and Ivanka had an ethics lawyer who the January 6th Committee is now looking to for guidance in telling the story of what happened that day. Sooo we are in a lot of trouble. I was out of town last week and missed a lot of this. I spent a few days in Arkansas in parts of the Wichita National Forest, where it is literally impossible to get internet or cell phone reception. And I highly recommend this experience. I worried a little bit about the news I would miss, but upon returning to civilization, I felt kind of like I did when I would watch daytime soap operas with my grandma as a kid or in college, you know, when I’d come home over a long absence, come home and watch it with her on breaks.
Sarah Kendzior:
I could miss entire months of those soap opera episodes but the plots were still easy to follow because they moved so incredibly slow and the characters are so predictable and evil and even the wildest plot lines would be dragged out into kind of a stupefying inertia. It was fun back then and kind of comforting to have that in a daily television show. It is not at all fun or comforting to have that be the condition of your country's daily political life. Anyway, like I said, there is a lot of terrible news to choose from, but today I'm going to concentrate on what's happening in the Manhattan DA's office and what it tells us about elite criminal impunity in the US. So, here we go. First, I'm going to give you a little bit of background on what has transpired in 2022. It's not all World War III around here. War is at home as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
In February 2022, Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg, a newly elected attorney general in November 2021, he halted the Department's effort to seek an indictment of Donald Trump and attorney Mark Pomerantz, who was hired to work on that case in early 2021 quit in protest. And the case ended. And so Pomerantz now is being hailed as a brave hero while Bragg is playing the fall guy. You know, the guy who refused to prosecute the case. This simplistic narrative is intended to overshadow the long history of the Manhattan DA's office being used to protect criminal elites. I'm going to remind you of that history today and I'm going to start off by reading the beginning of Pomerantz's resignation letter, which was released to the public on March 23rd. Pomerantz writes, and this is a quote: “I write to tender my resignation as a special assistant district attorney and to explain my reasons for resigning. As you know from our recent conversations and presentations, I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the penal law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual statements of financial condition.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“His financial statements were false and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes. He did. In late 2021, then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance directed a thorough review of the facts and law relating to Mr. Trump's financial statements. Mr. Vance had been intimately involved in our investigation, attending grand jury presentations, sitting on certain witness interviews and receiving regular reports about the progress of the investigation. He concluded that the facts were prosecution and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.” Alright, I'll end it there and just say, Oh, really? So that's how we're gonna portray what happened?
Sarah Kendzior:
I have some questions about this. The first one is, Why did Cyrus Vance not prosecute Trump during the 12 years that he held the Manhattan DA position? Why in the world would he leave such an important investigation to newcomer Alvin Bragg? And why did Pomerantz not challenge Vance on his past actions in that resignation letter? This case is being framed as solely the decision and determination of Bragg with the broader context that the Trump administration was a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government removed from the examination because if it were included, it would implicate the Manhattan DA's office itself. Let's remember that none of Trump's financial crimes were hidden. They were documented in real time in the 1980s and 1990s by investigative journalists like Wayne Barrett. Trump's abuse of the legal system through his mentor, mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, and later through successor mafia lawyers after Cohn died in 1986 is also well documented.
Sarah Kendzior:
Trump's close ties to Giuliani and Giuliani's role as the guy who cleared out the Italian mafia to make way for the Russian mafia that bolstered both Trump and Giuliani's power and fortunes is also well documented. And if you want some, you know, documentation, you could read my book, Hiding in Plain Sight. Pomerantz, as a prosecutor who spent his career taking out the Italian mafia, would be intimately familiar with this history. He would know full well about the transnational criminal network that took the place of John Gotti and other mafia dons, a network that thrived in Manhattan's white-collar crime in real estate worlds, a network that built and bolstered Donald Trump. He would know how deep its roots go because he was a witness and like other witnesses in that corrupt legal system, he stayed quiet until it was too late.
Sarah Kendzior (00:12:15):
Mark Pomerantz knew this dark history. I knew this dark history. The people who tried to sell you Mark Pomerantz as some sort of savior back in 2021, the people who are now ignoring the broad history of corruption and complicity in the DA's office while pinning the entire failure on Alvin Bragg, they know this history, too. They knew how this history would inform the future if it was not confronted, if the rot was not gutted out with urgency. They knew and they lied to you. These are cruel manipulators who prey on people's fears and sell you illusions. They are a cog in the clock that the criminal elites run out. They are the mortar in the brick wall standing between you and justice. To bring this point home, I'm going to read a very brief excerpt from the February 24th, 2021 episode of Gaslit Nation when we discussed Pomerantz being hired and being hyped up by institutionalist defenders as “the guy who would bring Trump down”. I'm not repeating this to say, “I told you so”. It is very unpleasant to be right about terrible things.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm repeating this excerpt to show you how easy all these events were to predict and to remind you that what is predictable is to some extent preventable. The criminal elites do not want you to know this basic fact. They do not want you to accept it. This is why so many officials are constantly feigning shock about obvious crimes and obvious enablers. If they do not feign shock, then the public will expect accountability. The public may in fact demand accountability, so they need to pretend that no one could have known. But we did know. Anyway, here's what I said 14 months ago. And I'm now quoting myself: “There's a lot of people hyping up, as Andrea said, Vance hiring Mark Pomerantz, who had worked on prosecuting the mafia. My response to that is, Well, Mueller did the same thing. He hired a whole bunch of mafia experts, white-collar crime experts, and what did they do? Nothing.”
Sarah Kendzior:
“They did nothing. It doesn't matter what somebody's background is. It matters what kind of actions they produce and who they're willing to take on. It's one thing to take on John Gotti. It's another to take on a transnational crime syndicate that's got its hooks in giant corporations and in governments around the world. Is Cy Vance brave enough to do that? History says no. And so I don't take the hiring of Pomerantz as a great sign.” Now, why was I so skeptical? Well, let's review what Cy Vance did while he was in the DA's office from 2010 onward. Vance, the son of a former secretary of state, was installed to protect criminal elites, particularly those in politics and their offspring. During his tenure, he protected among many others Harvey Weinstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Jeffrey Epstein. Vance has deep ties to the Trump crime cult and has acted in the past to protect them.
Sarah Kendzior (00:15:46:
In 2010, Ivanka and Don, Jr. were nearly indicted for felony by the Manhattan DA's office for their involvement with Trump Soho, which was a Russian mafia money laundering operation. The person who stopped that indictment was Cy Vance, and he did it following a meeting with a Trump lawyer who gave a hefty donation to Vance's campaign and asked Vance to drop the investigation. So, you could say, “Okay, but that was 2010. That was before Trump became president and tried to overthrow the United States. Obviously Cy Vance has learned and changed and wants to do right by America.” No, he did not. Unbelievably, people really made that claim. People really spent the last few years trying to sell you an illusion of Cy Vance as some warrior for justice as Cy Vance was protecting not only Trump, but other members of the Trump crime cult. Last spring, the DA's office indicted Trump Org CEO Allen Weisselberg on very limited charges and then pretended that he was going to flip.
Sarah Kendzior:
This fake flip is the exact same move that the Mueller team made when they pretended that Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn were cooperating with them in order to “reel in the big fish”, as my Twitter trolls say incessantly online The big fish was not reeled in. The big fish helped oversee a pandemic leading to mass death and then launched a coup that culminated in an attack on the Capitol and still wields such tremendous power that he's a plausible candidate for 2024, and our democracy is in grave danger because of that. But they love this move. They love the fake flip. It's a move to buy time, to run out the clock until they can officially end the case. This is why the officials tasked with holding Trump accountable move incredibly slowly, when they move at all, and you can see this over decades.
Sarah Kendzior:
You can see this in the DOJ. You can see this in SDNY, in the Manhattan DA's office, in the January 6th Committee, in all of the long drawn out court cases that Trump has been involved in for the last 40 years and that his network has been involved in. They use the same team of lawyers. They use the same tactics. They tried to get directed to the same group of judges. And, of course, when Trump was president, he was able to appoint judges. He was able to place people in positions of power, basically selecting his own judge and jury. This is what they do. They commit crimes and then rewrite the law. So the crimes are no longer considered crimes. When that doesn't work, they'll threaten the judge. They'll threaten the jury. They rewrite the story in the media. This is a mafia state. We're still living in a mafia state despite the fact that Biden is president.
Sarah Kendzior:
And while I definitely think there are legitimate things to look into for Hunter Biden—I think the people blowing that off are very naive—I don't think there's, you know, an indication that Joe Biden is part of this network, but his timidity toward the American branch of this transnational crime syndicate is furthering America's demise and possibly furthering his own, and as I'm going to describe in a minute, also is abetting Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other horrific authoritarian acts by Russia that I do believe Biden sincerely opposes. I was hoping to talk about this with Andrea, but he had his “gaffe”, you know, that his advisors pressured him to walk back, calling Putin a war criminal and saying he should no longer be in charge. I thought that was a good indication. I think when your gaffe is to condemn war crimes, that's a pretty good sign. And so that makes it all the more disheartening that he can't summon that kind of strong condemnation for the Americans who are helping a bet that war criminal.
Sarah Kendzior (00:20:19:
Speaking of those Americans… In February 2021, potential charges against Paul Manafort, Trump's Kremlin agent campaign manager, were dropped after Cy Vance attempted to file the charges in a way that violated New York state laws on double jeopardy, thus enabling Manafort to remain free. I am now going to summon the ghost of Andrea Chalupa to explain to you why what Cy Vance did in the Paul Manafort case was so profoundly dangerous. Allow me to travel back in time and present a clip from our February 10th, 2021 episode which is very subtly titled “TRAITORS” in all caps. So, Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa on February 10th, 2021:
You see Paul Manofort's blood money-stained fingerprints all over this. So the guy is a Goebbels. He's brilliant at leveraging the dark arts of propaganda as a weapon, and propaganda kills. He's just mobbed up with the Kremlin right now and then has made a career off of that for a very long time. And this is a time where to have Paul Manafort walking around free when the Kremlin is openly at war with us, when the Kremlin’s unleashing a devastating Pearl Harbor cyber attack on our leading industries and chambers of government, why would you have Putin's operative out and about right now? This guy is a clear and present danger. He is a traitor. If you could not get him on this financial fraud, then where are the laws about being a traitor? Last I heard, it's against the law to be a traitor against your country.
Andrea Chalupa on February 10th, 2021:
This man is a traitor operating out in the open and Cy Vance, as I said earlier, future historians of authoritarianism that are going to study this moment in American's history, not all names are gonna make it into the shorthand of what happened to America in the early 21st century, not all the names are gonna be there in the history books for the kids, but Cy Vance stands a very good chance of getting his own special place in history as one of the people in a position of power that could have stopped this and did not because of his own greed and corruption. And here Cy Vance is again where he pounced on the Manafort case instantly, where he brought those state charges instantly in March, 2019, and right away, I got a pit in my stomach knowing that Cy Vance is gonna screw this up. And he did.
Andrea Chalupa on February 10th, 2021:
There was a really good analysis, which we’ll link to in the show notes, talking about how Cy Vance essentially created a case against Paul Manafort at the state level in New York which was going to immediately play into the hands of double jeopardy problems. And as he did this—and he was so quick to do this—very good Patriots in New York state passed a law saying that in New York state, authorities could still pursue charges if a president abused their presidential pardon. And that law was passed in 2019, several months after Cy Vance seized on his moment to go after Paul Manafort using a doomed case of double jeopardy. So why the hell didn't Cy Vance, if he cared at all about this country, why didn't he wait to figure out how to pursue a very tricky case against Paul Manafort and not step into the double jeopardy trap? Why didn't Cy Vance wait? If he had waited, New York state a couple months later, would've closed the loophole. Okay? They would've closed the loophole, allowing Cy Vance to go after Paul Manafort and the double jeopardy issue would no longer be there. I mean, that's what that reads like to me. It was just… The fact that Cy Vance pushed this through before New York had a chance to fix its loophole, this law, that's extremely suspicious and it's very much in the larger track record of doom justice that Cy Vance has inflicted on our country.
Sarah Kendzior (00:24:12):
So that was Andrea discussing Paul Manafort and Cy Vance. And I'll just say the situation has only gotten worse since then. After blowing the Manafort case, Vance then subpoenaed Steve Bannon's records—which again, got all the institutionalist defenders very excited—and proceeded to do nothing with them. Bannon and Manafort remain free and are actively doing harm to this country. Bannon and Manafort are not as difficult to prosecute as Trump is, for the obvious reason that they did not serve as president, and in certain respects they are more dangerous than Trump. But all three men present a profound threat to US national security. They also pose a threat to global security since they possess state secrets and they are happy to weaponize them against the United States in favor of their authoritarian backers abroad, in particular, the Kremlin. As you watch the Russian invasion of Ukraine continue, you should remember that these treasonous powerful operatives are being allowed to roam free and alter the course of both domestic and international politics with the price paid in human life.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now I'm going to conclude with some words about Alvin Bragg, the current DA. The corruption crisis at the DA's office is largely of Cy Vance's making, although it precedes even Vance since Trump's mafia network was active in the decades prior and largely remained untouched. You could look at DA Robert Morgenthau, for example, who was there before Vance and who had Jared Kushner working as an intern in his office. That's a story for another day. Anyway, right now, this failure is on Bragg. Bragg may be the crime cult's fall guy, but he is willing to be their fall guy and therefore he is obviously complicit as well. Many people are demanding Bragg's resignation or, at the least, an explanation of what happened. These are the correct demands to make of him, but they are being framed in the media, once again, to rehabilitate Cy Vance's reputation and to portray Vance as a crime fighter stopped in his tracks by Bragg.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is not what happened. This travesty was not created by Bragg, but inherited by him, and then Bragg chose to continue the cover ups and corruption. And yes, obviously I want to know what informed that decision, how voluntary it was, whether he's complicit or whether he's threatened. Those are generally the two options we've dealt with for the last six years of the Trump presidency in its aftermath. Alvin Bragg needs to come clean not only about why the investigation into Trump was stopped, but about the decades of corruption in the Manhattan DA's office that preceded his arrival. That would be a great service to America. That would open the door to true accountability. So I'm gonna end there and go check on the mysterious mission of my buddy, Andrea. Again, please check Patreon for our analyses of Putin's war on Ukraine and other topics and please check out the interview series that we're going to be launching in April.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's called Gaslit Nation Presents Rising Up from the Ashes: Cassandras and Other Experts on Rebuilding Democracy. This is going to be a series of interviews with experts on different topics, on how to save American democracy, how to enforce accountability, and how to sort of psychologically survive this time. There have been some folks that our Gaslit Nation listening audience has been asking us for years to have on this show as our guests. And I'm really happy to say we did get those folks to come on. We're going to announce the list soon. The interviews are awesome. So please stay tuned for that. And thank you again for your support of our show.
[outro theme music]
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Oil Change International, an advocacy group supported with the generous donation from the Greta Thunberg Foundation that exposes the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitates the ongoing transition to clean energy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to help support Ukraine by donating to Razom for Ukraine at razomforukraine.org. We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. Donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the Palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at theorangutangproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kenzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Damien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
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