Bragg sues Jim Jordan in move to block interference in Trump case

NEW YORK — The Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday sued Rep. Jim Jordan, R-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, accuses Jordan of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on the prosecution of Trump and a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack” the district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Bragg last week unveiled 34 felony charges against 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 Bragg are seeking to bar 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. Pomerantz resigned early last year after Bragg, just weeks into his first term in office, decided not to seek an indictment of Trump at that time.

Bragg’s lawyers, including Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. of the law firm Gibson Dunn, and Leslie Dubeck, the general counsel in the district attorney’s office, also intend to prevent any other such subpoenas, the lawsuit says. Jordan has left open the possibility of subpoenaing Bragg.

“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 Trump’s supporters — many of them “threatening and racially charged” — since the former president predicted his own arrest last month.

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 Bragg’s lawyers, which would have prohibited any enforcement of the subpoena sent to Pomerantz.

Instead, she ordered that Jordan’s lawyers respond by April 17 and scheduled a hearing in the case for April 19, the day that Jordan’s committee had set for Pomerantz’s deposition.

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