New adversary looms for Trump as Vance exits Manhattan DA race
NEW YORK >> Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, announced Friday he would not run for reelection, setting off a wideopen race to lead one of the most important crime-fighting offices in the country and making it highly likely that any potential case against former President Donald Trump will be left in a newcomer’s hands.
Vance made the long-expected announcement in a memo to his staff early Friday morning, just weeks before the filing deadline for the race. The many candidates clamoring to replace him are, with few exceptions, seeking to fundamentally reshape the office.
A scion of one of Manhattan’s wellknown liberal families, Vance is one of only four people to be elected Manhattan district attorney in nearly 80 years. He took office in 2010 and presided over the office during a decade when crime numbers plummeted and attitudes toward the criminal justice system changed.
Vance was the hand-picked successor of Robert M. Morgenthau, who served for 35 years and built the office’s reputation as one of the largest and most ambitious prosecutorial agencies in the country. When Vance took the helm, he vowed to stick to the practices that he said had served the office in good stead for years. He said while campaigning that he would not attempt to fix what was not broken.
But at times, Vance, 66, seemed to
be swimming against the current of public opinion in his liberal district, as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements raised awareness of ingrained biases in the criminal justice system and led to calls for wholesale reform.
The eight-way race to succeed Vance reflects those newer political currents. Three of the candidates running to be New York County’s lead prosecutor have no prosecutorial experience at all. The five others in the race have distanced themselves from Vance, including two who worked in his office, Lucy Lang and Diana Florence, who rarely mention his tenure in a positive light.
Vance’s announcement, first reported in The New Yorker, was widely expected.
During his three terms in office, Vance won praise for pioneering data-driven methods to more effectively target violent crime, but was faulted in some quarters for being too tentative when investigating powerful figures.
Vance drew fire, then praise, for his dealings with Trump.
After Trump rose to power, the district attorney was criticized for a 2012 decision to end a criminal investigation into fraud allegations against Trump and two of his children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Prosecutors had been looking into whether the Trumps misled investors in a condominium project. Vance said the investigation ended in part because victims would not cooperate after having reached a civil settlement with the Trump family.
For many Democrats, however, few of Vance’s triumphs loom larger than his dual wins at the Supreme Court as he later sought to investigate Trump and his business. Prosecutors are examining whether Trump fraudulently manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits.
In July of last year, the justices declared that Vance’s office — and by extension, all state prosecutors — had the right to seek evidence from a sitting president in a criminal investigation, setting a lasting limit on the scope of presidents’ powers and immunity from prosecution.
And last month, the justices rejected in a brief unsigned order a last-ditch attempt to block Vance’s subpoena for Trump’s tax and financial records.
“I don’t know how many local prosecutors could do that,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Vance’s longtime deputy. “Just the ability to bring that case, go to the Supreme Court and now to be in possession of Donald Trump’s tax returns and doing a sweeping criminal investigation into the former president of the United States.”