Alvin Bragg has already achieved a historic first by taking office Saturday as Manhattan’s first African-American district attorney. Now he is weighing another: whether to make Donald Trump the first former president charged with a crime.
As a district attorney, Bragg inherited an investigation into Trump and his business practices from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., who refused to seek reelection last year after 12 years in the high-profile position.
After weeks of speculation about whether Vance would blast his term out of office by impeaching Trump, the former district attorney left that decision to Bragg, a 48-year-old civil rights attorney and former federal prosecutor who was sworn in in a private ceremony, in part. due to concerns about COVID-19.
Bragg told CNN last month that he will be directly involved in the Trump affair. He also said he asked the two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance, General Counsel Carey Dunne and former mob prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, to stay and carry it out.
“This is obviously a consequential case, one that deserves the attention of the prosecutor personally,” Bragg told CNN.
The investigation resulted in charges last summer against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization and its chief of finance, Allen Weisselberg. In the fall, Vance convened a new grand jury to hear the evidence in the case.
Trump himself remains under investigation by the bureau after Vance led a multi-year fight to gain access to the Republican’s tax records.
As New York’s top deputy 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, amid a growing wave of progressive and reformist prosecutors across the country, defeated Republican Thomas Kenniff in November after winning an eight-candidate Democratic primary in the spring.
Bragg campaigned in part on a promise to change the culture of the district attorney’s office. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in Harlem during the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, Bragg said he wants to “shrink the system” and refused to pursue many low-level crimes and seek alternatives to prosecuting petty “crimes of poverty.” .
At age 15, a police officer stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer while he was walking to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at the urging of his parents, sparking interest in the law.
He has had a knife to his throat. As an adult, he opened his home to a brother-in-law who had just been released from prison. Sometimes, Bragg says, the order’s squad would show up looking for the brother-in-law, banging on the door and waking their children.
Bragg spent the final days of his campaign participating in a rare judicial investigation into the death of Eric Garner, whose pleas for “I can’t breathe” to police officers who strangled him to the ground became a rallying cry during the manifestations of Black Lives Matter in 2014. Bragg called it the most “emotionally significant” case of his career.
Upon being elected prosecutor, Bragg said voters had given him “deep confidence.”
“The critical role of the district attorney is to ensure both justice and safety,” Bragg told his supporters on election night.
“That is the trust that has been granted to me on the electoral ballot, but that has been granted to all of us, for that we have worked, to show the city and the country a model to unite associations, unite justice and security in one” .
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