Alvin Bragg just beat House Republicans at their own game
Former Manhattan DA’s office prosecutor Mark Pomerantz testified on Friday behind closed doors about DA Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against Donald Trump. Bragg and Pomerantz initially fought the Pomerantz subpoena in court, but even after winning the initial ruling, they agreed to have Pomerantz testify anyway – with a member of Bragg’s team present. This helped ensure that Pomerantz couldn’t unwittingly reveal anything that Bragg’s team doesn’t want out there yet.
House Republicans came out of Friday’s Pomerantz testimony publicly complaining to the media about how ‘uncooperative’ Pomerantz was. In other words, they got nothing out of Pomerantz, and his testimony was the non-story we always knew it would be. Now that Pomerantz has testified, House Republicans have lost their ability to argue that Pomerantz’s refusal to testify means he and Bragg must be hiding something. In other words, Bragg just beat House Republicans at their own game.
In politics, if someone’s testimony is going to be useless to you anyway, you don’t want the testimony. You want the talking point about how they’re refusing to testify, so you can try to convince the public that there must be some kind of massive coverup underway. House Republicans would have been better off if Pomerantz hadn’t testified. Then they could have at least pretended Pomerantz and Bragg were hiding something.
