NEW YORK (AP) — Alvin Bragg has already notched one historic first, taking office Saturday as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney. Now he’s weighing another: whether to make Donald Trump the first former president ever charged with a crime.
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As district attorney, Bragg inherited an investigation into Trump and his business practices from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., who declined to seek reelection last year after 12 years in the high-profile job.
After weeks of speculation about whether Vance would close his tenure with a bang by indicting Trump, the former D.A. has passed that decision to Bragg, a 48-year-old civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor who was sworn in at a private ceremony, in part because of COVID-19 concerns.
Bragg told CNN last month that he’ll be directly involved in the Trump matter. He also said he has asked the two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance — general counsel Carey Dunne and former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz — to stay on and see it through.
“This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the D.A. personally,” Bragg told CNN.
The investigation resulted in charges last summer against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. In the fall, Vance convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in the case.
Trump himself remains under investigation by the office after Vance led a multiyear fight to get access to the Republican’s tax records.
As a top deputy to New York’s attorney general in 2018, Bragg helped oversee a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trump’s charitable foundation over allegations that he used the nonprofit to further his political and business interests.
Bragg, among a growing wave of progressive, reform-minded prosecutors across the country, defeated Republican Thomas Kenniff in November after winning an eight-way Democratic primary in the spring.
Bragg campaigned partly on a promise to change the culture of the district attorney’s office. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in Harlem during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic, Bragg said he wants to “shrink the system,” declining to pursue many low-level offenses and look for alternatives to prosecuting small “crimes of poverty.”
At age 15, a police officer stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer as he walked to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at his parents’ urging, sparking an interest in the law.
He has had a knife held to his throat. As an adult, he opened his home to a brother-in-law just released from prison. Sometimes, Bragg says, the warrant squad would show up looking for the brother-in-law, banging on the door and waking up his children.
Bragg spent the final days of his campaign participating in a rare judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner, whose pleas of “I can’t breathe” to police officers who hauled him to the ground in a chokehold became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2014. Bragg called it the most “emotionally significant” case of his career.
Being elected D.A., Bragg said voters had given him a “profound trust.”
“The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety,” Bragg told supporters on election night.
“That is the trust has been given to me on the ballot, but given to all of us — that’s what we’ve worked for — to show the city and the country a model for pairing partnership, pairing fairness and safety into one.”
Well the upper manhattan folks love to be glutton for punishment. When they will be getting mugged and attacked they probably still won’t wake up. Thanks for electing such a fine DA.
Friend of the criminals.
“This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the D.A. personally,” Bragg told CNN.
Right. Everything in Manhattan is so wonderful there is so little crime going for the DA to worry about that an article about the new DA focuses so much on a Trump investigation that has been going on for years and years already. Without a single mention of any crime that the DA will fight to prevent
Watch Manhattan become the next San Francisco
What happened to racial diversity? It appears that all top level officials in NYC Government are Black. Don’t the rest of New York City residents deserve representation
Seriously, the new Manhattan DA should concentrate on losing weight. He is going to be in a very high stress job, as it is; that, together with being at least 35 lbs. overweight, does not contribute to good health.
what ever happened to racial diversity? Black Mayor, Black PC, Black DA. Looks like the entire upper echelon of NYC government will be обезьяны
shrink the system,” declining to pursue many low-level offenses
Trump is a low level offense. You think he murdered anyone? We need to stop considering rich white guys as evil for small crimes, while “minorities” are given a free pass to wreck havoc. This is like the communists who took control in 1917 letting it out on all the rich brurgosos . Attempted murder 8 years but Shelly sliver 15 years . We are a corrupt country. Drain the swamp