NEW YORK — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Donald Trump’s business dealings must testify this week before a congressional committee.

Mark Pomerantz, a former prosecutor in the state-level criminal investigation, was subpoenaed to testify Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington. The subpoena prompted a lawsuit last week by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg against Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who chairs the committee.

U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil ordered Pomerantz to testify in a 25-page opinion she issued after hearing legal arguments in federal court in Manhattan.

“Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition,” Vyskocil wrote in the opinion. “No one is above the law.”

Vyskocil asked Bragg’s lawyers why Pomerantz, who wrote a memoir on the case, should be immune from complying with the congressional probe and why Bragg’s office did not try to stop the book from being published if its release and a deposition covering the same subjects would be harmful to their pending case.

Vyskocil, who was nominated to the bench by President Trump in 2018, also suggested that she did not think she had the authority to cut off a legitimate exploration of an issue by Congress. At one point, the judge held up a maroon-colored pocket copy of the Constitution to emphasize the clause that protects Congress from being sued for conducting its business.

The judge said she could not make assumptions about the committee’s motivation to look into Bragg’s case and to hear from Pomerantz. The committee has said it has the right to explore the matter because of $5,000 in federal funding used by the district attorney’s office during the investigation.

Bragg’s side has argued the funds were used in an earlier phase of the case that resulted in a conviction against the Trump Organization and its longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg for tax fraud and related counts.

“It’s not for the court to tell Congress, if it’s a valid subpoena, how to conduct its inquiry,” Vyskocil said.

The district attorney’s office filed a notice of appeal of the court’s decision and is expected to ask a federal appeals court to issue a stay before Pomerantz’s scheduled session with the committee Thursday morning.

Bragg has accused Jordan and the committee of a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” on his office’s state-level probe, and the lawsuit was filed partly to try to invalidate the Pomerantz summons. Attorneys for Bragg have said the investigation improperly aims to interrupt and discredit a legitimate prosecution and violates the long-held standard that state prosecutors operate with sovereignty from the federal government.

Jordan announced a probe of the recent criminal indictment of Trump by Bragg, a Democrat, claiming the case is politically motivated. The committee has pointed to public comments made by Pomerantz in a published memoir disparaging Trump as proof that the office has a bias against the former president, who has announced a 2024 run for the White House.

The district attorney’s office filed an indictment against Trump on March 30 on 34 counts of falsifying business records, a low-level felony, in connection with $130,000 paid to adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 as the presidential campaign wound down. Trump appeared in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan on April 4 and pleaded not guilty.

The case is centered on a payment made by then-Trump attorney and confidant Michael Cohen to Daniels to silence her about an alleged sexual encounter she says she had with Trump years earlier, an encounter Trump denies. Bragg has argued that Trump illegally misclassified the nature of his reimbursements to Cohen in an effort to avoid reporting the Daniels expense on campaign finance disclosures.

Bragg has argued the Jordan committee activity amounts to a harassment campaign by a congressman who is a Trump loyalist.

On Monday, Jordan’s committee held a field hearing in Lower Manhattan to examine crime in New York and what Republicans argued were Bragg’s too-lenient policies. At the hearing, elected officials on both sides of the aisle hurled competing statistics about the state of public safety in New York. The witnesses were mostly critics of Bragg.

Pomerantz and his attorney, Ted Wells, declined to comment after the hearing Wednesday.

Also Wednesday, Weisselberg, 75, was released from the Rikers Island jail complex after serving several months for his conviction in the tax case, according to city records. He pleaded guilty to 15 counts and testified against the company, earning him a sharply reduced sentence of five months in jail. He was expected to serve less than that with good behavior factored in.

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