Former US President Donald Trump was indicted last week by New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a first in US history.
Alvin Bragg, New York prosecutor, will certainly go down in history for having brought criminal charges against Donald Trump, an unprecedented fact for a former American president. The 49-year-old Democrat was elected in November 2021 to this position, and is the first African-American man to become a New York prosecutor.
Born in Harlem, at the time a difficult neighborhood in northern New York where the crime rate was very high and drug trafficking important, he studied at the prestigious Harvard Law School, where he specialized in civil rights cases. After his studies, Alvin Bragg worked in the office of the Attorney General of New York in the southern district of the city, and took a great interest in the faults committed by the police, having himself witnessed and suffered from blunders in his youth. in Harlem.
Since his election as prosecutor, Alvin Bragg has distinguished himself by his more progressive approach than his predecessors: he has directly announced that he will no longer prosecute minor offenders, and believes that prison should only be a last resort solution, thus provoking the anger of the conservatives, who accuse him of laxity. He, however, had to back down after criticism from New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who campaigned on tough on crime.
Alvin Bragg is now known for being the first prosecutor to indict a former US president. During his campaign for the post of prosecutor, he claimed to have the experience and the abilities to deal with high-profile cases such as those concerning Donald Trump.
In 2022, however, he was deemed too slow on the case of Donald Trump and pornographic actress Stormy Daniels – for which he is now charged – and two assistant prosecutors resigned by denouncing Alvin Bragg’s “doubts” on the seriousness and admissibility of the case. However, the investigation accelerated at the start of 2023, the grand jury he convened having finally voted to indict the 45th President of the United States. He is accused of having bought $ 130,000 the silence of Stormy Daniels, with whom he would have had a relationship more than fifteen years ago, shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
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Alvin Bragg has also worked on another file concerning Donald Trump: he succeeded in having his family company, the Trump Organization, criminally sentenced last January to a fine of $ 1.6 million for financial and tax fraud. A major civil trial in this case is also expected this year. The prosecutor’s office had relied in particular on a close friend of Donald Trump, Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, who had pleaded guilty and cooperated with justice.
If Donald Trump had not been prosecuted personally in this case, he nevertheless called prosecutor Alvin Bragg several times a “leftist” and a “racist” and denounced, as usual, a witch hunt against his against. Regarding the Stormy Daniels case, the ex-president accused the prosecutor last Saturday of being “corrupt and very politicized”.
Other cases for the New York prosecutor include the indictment of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is accused of defrauding donors to a fundraising campaign promising to build a wall. along the border with Mexico. He also, in 2018, worked on a lawsuit filed in New York against former movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein, and also represented the family of Eric Garner, an African American killed during a police check in the during which he was strangled by an officer.
