Alvin Bragg was sworn in as Manhattan DA, taking over Trump’s case

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NEW YORK – Alvin Bragg has already earned a historic first, taking office Saturday as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney. Now he’s weighing in on another: whether to make Donald Trump the first former president to be charged with crime.

As district attorney, Bragg inherited the investigation into Trump and his business skills from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., who refused to be re -elected last year after 12 years in high -profile work.

After weeks of speculation about whether Vance would close his term by prosecuting Trump, the former DA passed that decision on to Bragg, a 48-year-old civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor who was sworn in in a private ceremony, in part because of concerns with Covid.

Bragg told CNN last month that he was directly involved in the Trump case. He also said he asked the two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance – general counsel Carey Dunne and former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz – to stay and review it.

“This is clearly a consequential case, one that deserves the DA’s personal attention,” Bragg told CNN.

The investigation resulted in lawsuits last summer against Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime head of finance, Allen Weisselberg. In the fall, Vance convened a new grand jury to hear the evidence in the case.

Trump himself remains under office investigation after Vance led a multiyear fight to gain access to Republican tax records.

As a leading representative of New York’s attorney general in 2018, Bragg helped handle a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trump’s charitable foundation over allegations he used the nonprofit to advance 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 partially with a promise to change the culture of the district attorney’s office. Based on his own experiences growing up in Harlem during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic, Bragg said he wanted to “shrink the system,” refusing to pursue many low-level offenses and seek alternatives to prosecuting small “crime of poverty.”

At age 15, a police officer pointed a gun at his face and falsely accused him of being a drug dealer as he walked to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at the urging of his parents, which sparked interest in the law.

He had a knife stuck in 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 warrant squad will come out looking for the brother -in -law, knocking on the door and waking up his children.

Bragg spent the last days of his campaign participating in an extraordinary judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner, whose “I can’t breathe” pleas to police officers who dragged 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.

As elected DA, Bragg said voters gave him “deep confidence.”

“The primary duty of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety,” Bragg told supporters on election night.

“That’s the trust that was given to me on the ballot, but given to all of us – that’s what we worked so hard for – to show the city and the country a model for pairing partnership, pairing fairness and safety in one.”

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