Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped his effort to quash a congressional subpoena to a former prosecutor who worked in his office, a congressional aide told The Epoch Times in a statement on Friday.
“This evening, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office withdrew its appeal in Bragg v. Jordan. Mr. Pomerantz’s deposition will go forward on May 12, and we look forward to his appearance,” Russel Dye, spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to The Epoch Times in a statement.
“Bragg caved. Jim Jordan won,” the House Judiciary Committee wrote in a statement on Twitter Friday.
The development wrapped up a legal clash between Bragg and House Judiciary Republicans, whereby Bragg had attempted to stop the lawmakers from requesting testimony from Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor who investigated former President Donald Trump’s finances. Pomerantz left Bragg’s office in February 2022 in protest of Bragg’s initial unwillingness to bring an indictment against Trump.
A grand jury, encouraged by Bragg, brought an indictment against Trump in late March, prompting Jordan to initiate a probe into what he calls a “politically motivated” prosecution against a former president. Jordan subpoenaed Pomerantz to seek his testimony as a part of that probe. In response, Bragg sued the House Judiciary Committee and Pomerantz to prevent Pomerantz from testifying.
That lawsuit led to a hearing on Wednesday in the Southern District Court of New York, and a subsequent decision by District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, ordered that the congressional panel has the authority to become involved in the investigation of Trump and declined Bragg’s request for a court injunction on the congressional subpoena.
Bragg wrote in a court filing that he intended to appeal the lower court’s decision to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on April 19. On the same day, the court issued a temporary administrative hold on the return date of the House Judiciary Committee’s congressional subpoena of Pomerantz. This administrative hold did not reflect the court’s opinion on the merit of Bragg’s case, the court indicated in an April 19 filing, but serves as a short pause as the court considers whether to extend the freeze on the subpoena as Bragg appeals the case.
A three-judge panel was originally scheduled to decide early next week on this matter.
Bragg on Friday dropped the appeal, wrapping up the legal contention between him and the House lawmakers.
“Our successful stay of this subpoena blocked the immediate deposition and afforded us the time necessary to coordinate with the House Judiciary Committee on an agreement that protects the District Attorney’s privileges and interests. We are pleased with this resolution, which ensures any questioning of our former employee will take place in the presence of our General Counsel on a reasonable, agreed upon timeframe. We are gratified that the Second Circuit’s ruling provided us with the opportunity to successfully revolve this dispute,” Bragg’s office wrote in a statement on Friday on Twitter.
Judge’s Comments
During the district court hearing on Wednesday, the court affirmed the congressional lawmakers’ position that requesting Pomerantz’s testimony serves a valid legislative interest and that Pomerantz, due to his own conduct, is not protected by confidentiality privileges.
In her order, Vyskocil agreed with the congressional lawmakers’ reasoning that testimony by Pomerantz can help inform current and pending legislation. This includes a bill that, if enacted into law, would bar the use of federal funds to investigate a sitting or former president (the Accountability for Lawless Violence In our Neighborhoods, or ALVIN, Act) and another that would allow Congress to remove an action or prosecution against a former president (H.R. 2553).
“It is not the role of the federal judiciary to dictate what legislation Congress may consider or how it should conduct its deliberations in that connection,” the judge wrote, adding that the U.S. Constitution protects lawmakers from litigation when their actions serve a valid legislative interest.
She rejected Bragg’s attempt to use a Supreme Court decision (Trump v. Mazars) to justify his case. In that decision, the highest court ruled in Trump’s favor and stated that the congressional committees couldn’t subpoena Trump’s financial statements because doing so would violate the separation of power between the executive and legislative branches.
During the Wednesday hearing, Bragg’s attorneys said that the reasoning in Trump v. Mazars applies to this case, and that the committee’s subpoena is an unconstitutional intrusion of the legislative branch into a state executive branch prosecution. Vyskocil disagreed.
“The congressional subpoena in Mazars was directed at materials pertaining to the sitting President of the United States,” Vyskocil wrote in her ruling, noting that Trump clearly represented the executive branch then.
“In contrast, here, the subpoena was issued to a private citizen who is no longer employed by any state government and who has written a book and spoken extensively about the subject matter of the congressional inquiry,” she wrote. “The Court is not persuaded that Mazars applies to this case.”
In her ruling, Vyskocil also rejected Bragg’s reasoning that Pomerantz enjoys confidentiality privileges and thus must not be compelled to reveal information about his former employment at the Manhattan DA’s office. Vyskocil noted that because she cannot predict what Congress would ask and what Pomerantz would say, it is not logical to say that such hypothetical statements would violate privilege.
“Bragg’s throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to privilege is unpersuasive,” Vyskocil wrote. “This Court will not quash a subpoena based solely on Bragg’s seemingly endless string of ‘what ifs.’”
Pomerantz, in an April 17 court filing, wrote that he would be put in an “impossible position” if he were to testify in Congress because he could face criminal prosecution if he testifies—violating confidentiality laws—or if he refuses to testify—committing contempt of Congress.
The judge dismissed this concern.
“[T]he Court notes that Pomerantz is in this situation because he decided to inject himself into the public debate by authoring a book that he has described as ‘appropriate and in the public interest,’” Vyskocil wrote in her Wednesday order.
“[Bragg] cannot seriously claim that any information already published in Pomerantz’s book and discussed on prime-time television in front of millions of people is protected from disclosure as attorney work product (or otherwise).”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
