For Manhattan DA, it’s not politics
Hush-money case centers on ‘a lie ... to evade the law’
NEW YORK — When he was elected two years ago as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, Alvin Bragg spoke candidly about his unease with the job’s political demands. The former law professor is more comfortable untangling complex legal questions than swaggering up to a lectern on a podium.
But when the first of Donald Trump’s four criminal prosecutions heads to trial Monday, about alleged hush-money payments to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 election, Bragg will be at the center of a political maelstrom with few precedents.
Even before announcing the 34-count felony indictment against Trump last year, Bragg was a lightning rod for conservative critics who said he wasn’t tough enough on crime. The trial will test the Democrat’s efforts to portray himself as apolitical in the face of relentless attacks from the Republican former president and his supporters, who say the prosecution is the epitome of partisanship.
Echoing the racist tropes he has deployed frequently against his legal adversaries, Trump has called Bragg a “thug” and a “degenerate psychopath,” urging his supporters to take action against the “danger to our country.”
Bragg, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has rejected that, comparing the prosecution against Trump to any other case of financial crime.
“At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our whitecollar cases,” Bragg said in announcing the indictment last year. “Someone lied again and again to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.”
The first trial of a former U.S. president will feature allegations that Trump falsified business records while compensating one of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, for burying stories about extramarital affairs that arose during the 2016 campaign.
The charges, which carry the possibility of jail time, threaten Trump’s campaign schedule as he faces a general-election rematch with President Joe Biden.
The Harlem-raised Bragg, 50, got his early political education during visits to the city’s homeless shelters, where his father worked. He said he was held at gunpoint six times while growing up — three times by overly suspicious police officers — and once had a knife held to his throat.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Bragg began his career as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, later joining the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan. As a top lawyer in the New York attorney general’s office, he oversaw investigations into police killings and a lawsuit that shut down Trump’s charitable foundation.
He said he had little interest in elected office, but Bragg joined a crowded race for Manhattan DA in 2019, running on a platform of “justice and public safety.”
The investigations into Trump and his businesses began under then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.
Once in office, Bragg surprised many by pausing the criminal investigation into Trump.
When he resurrected the case last April, the charges of falsifying records were raised to felonies under an unusual legal theory that Trump could be prosecuted in state court for violating federal campaign finance laws. Some legal experts say the strategy could backfire.
“It seems a bit of a legal reach, and the question is why are they doing it?” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School. “It can be hard to escape the conclusion that this effort would not have been taken if the defendant was not Donald Trump.”
Others have blessed the legal theory, including a federal judge, Alvin Hellerstein, who wrote in a decision last year that the law did not provide exceptions for election-related activities.
From his first days in office, Bragg was under a barrage of criticism over a memo instructing prosecutors not to seek jail time for some low-level offenses.
He walked back portions of the directive amid fierce protest from New York Police Department leaders, conservative media and some centrist Democrats, although he later said he regretted not pushing back more forcefully.
Most major crime rates in Manhattan are lower than before Bragg took office, but conservatives continue to accuse him of allowing rampant lawlessness.
In 2022, Bragg’s office pressured the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, into pleading guilty to evading taxes on company perks like a luxury car and rent-free apartment. Later that year, it put Trump’s company on trial and won a conviction on similar tax charges.
After that, Bragg convened a new grand jury, securing the indictment accusing Trump of falsely recording payments to Cohen as legal expenses, when they were for orchestrating payoffs to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to prevent them from going public with claims of extramarital sexual encounters with Trump.
Trump denies the accusations and says no crime was committed. Now, a jury is on the verge of being picked that will make a historic decision about whether Trump broke the law — or Bragg overreached.