Manhattan DA is familiar Trump foe
Bragg on receiving end of personal invective
Federal prosecutors and former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. declined to charge Donald Trump for covering up hush money payments, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was undeterred. Last year, he became the first prosecutor to secure a criminal indictment against a former president. And on Monday, the world’s attention turned to Bragg as Trump’s trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records began.
“The core is not money for sex,” Bragg said in a radio interview in December. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”
Trump has responded with personal invective, calling Bragg a “thug” and a “degenerate psychopath” who “hates the USA!”
A review of Bragg’s past work, however, shows a career in state and federal law enforcement and an interest in civil rights. After growing up in Harlem, Bragg earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University. He became an assistant state attorney general and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Between government jobs, he taught law and was co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School. Bragg represented the mother and sister of Eric Garner in seeking information about his death during an arrest by New York City police in 2014.
Upon taking office Jan. 1, 2022, Bragg became Manhattan’s first Black district attorney.
A long history with Trump
This is far from Bragg’s first Trump legal rodeo. Bragg has said he sued Trump more than 100 times when he worked in the state attorney general’s office, including successfully targeting the Trump Foundation for misuse of charitable funds for personal and political purposes.
In 2022, Bragg’s office won convictions against two parts of the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer. The Trump corporations were fined a combined $1.6 million for convictions on 17 felonies. Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in prison after pleading guilty to 15 charges in a scheme to avoid taxes.
In addition, Bragg just won a perjury conviction against Weisselberg, who was sentenced April 10 to another five months in jail based on his testimony in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil case against Trump for fraudulently inflating his assets on loan appli
cations.
Before Bragg became district attorney, Trump pardoned political strategist Steve Bannon for federal charges related to the not-for-profit We Build The Wall Inc., which was charged with money laundering and conspiracy in a scheme that raised millions of dollars. But Bragg and James announced a sixcount indictment against Bannon and the group. The New York trial is scheduled for May.
Other prosecutors declined to file hush money charges against Trump. Vance, Bragg’s predecessor, initiated the case but did not file charges before leaving office in late 2021. Trump has argued on social media there was no crime and that Vance “looked at it, took a pass.” Justice Department investigators ended their investigation into the payments in July 2019 after convicting Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen.
When unveiling the charges against Trump in March 2023, Bragg said Manhattan is the country’s most significant business market and “we cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.”