Law firm targeted by Trump agrees to provide $40m in pro bono work, says president Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a Democratic-leaning law firm he targeted for retribution in an executive order last week, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals.
In return, Trump said he has agreed to rescind the executive order.
Trump’s social media post announcing the agreement lays out the terms of the agreement and then includes two statements, one from the White House and a second from Paul, Weiss’s chairperson, Brad Karp, who met privately with Trump.
The pro-bono work is described in general terms as including, “assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects”.
The terms of the agreement are anodyne, as in the statement from Karp, who is quoted as saying: “We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration.”
It is not clear if Karp was aware of the claim, made by the White House, that during his meeting with Trump, “Mr Karp acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz.”
Pomerantz is a former federal prosecutor who left retirement in 2021 to work for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance on an investigation of then former president Trump’s finances.
According to Trump’s executive order, Pomerantz went to work for the Manhattan DA “solely to manufacture a prosecution against me and … according to his co-workers, unethically led witnesses in ways designed to implicate me”.
In Trump’s telling, “after being unable to convince even Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that a fraud case was feasible, Pomerantz engaged in a media campaign to gin up support for this unwarranted prosecution.”
Pomerantz told a very different story, both in his leaked 2022 resignation letter, and in his 2023 book, People vs. Donald Trump.
In the letter, addressed to Alvin Bragg, who had taken over as Manhattan DA from Vance, Pomerantz wrote:
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. 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 in on certain witness interviews, and receiving regular reports about the progress of the investigation. He concluded that the facts warranted 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.
This work was underway when you took office as District Attorney. You have devoted significant time and energy to understanding the evidence we have accumulated with respect to the Trump financial statements, as well as the applicable law. You have reached the decision not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time. The investigation has been suspended indefinitely. Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it, and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong. I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position.
After Bragg decided to indict Trump on different charges, Pomerantz made the case in an interview with 60 Minutes in 2023 that Trump should also have faced criminal charges for financial fraud.
A 2023 interview with Mark Pomerantz on 60 Minutes.
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