Prosecutor in Trump Case Wades Into Treacherous Political Waters

NEW YORK — Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has insisted that he does not pay attention to politics when deciding whether to charge someone with a crime.

But Bragg’s stated reluctance to consider the political ramifications of his office’s decisions has not quelled the storm brewing around him: He now appears poised to become the first prosecutor to indict a former president.

Charging former President Donald Trump in connection with a hush-money payment to a porn star would catapult Bragg onto the national stage. Already he faces second-guessing, even from putative allies, about the strength of the case and the wisdom of bringing it. And Trump, who has denied all wrongdoing, has begun attacking Bragg, a Democrat, as the latest in a string of politically-motivated prosecutors determined to bring him down. The ex-president has marshaled the support of his Republican allies in Congress and beyond.

It is unlikely that Bragg entered the race for district attorney expecting to indict Trump. When he announced his campaign in June 2019, there was little sign that the office’s then-dormant investigation would lead to criminal charges. And Bragg, 49, who has lived in New York nearly his entire life, had a vision for the office that had nothing to do with the president.

But the Trump question came to dominate the Democratic primary as the race entered its final stretch in 2021. As the district attorney’s investigation against the former president began to heat up, Bragg and his opponents started to signal to prospective voters that they had the bona fides to lead a potential prosecution of Trump.

Bragg had some history to draw on. In 2017 and 2018 he served as a senior official in the New York attorney general’s office, which at the time brought a bevy of lawsuits against Trump’s administration. One of them, filed in June 2018, accused the Donald J. Trump Foundation and the Trump family of “a shocking pattern of illegality.” That lawsuit was successful, leading to the foundation’s dissolution.

Still, as a candidate, Bragg was mostly focused elsewhere. His fundamental campaign promise was to balance public safety and fairness, following in the footsteps of a wave of recently elected prosecutors who pledged a new approach to crime. They argued that cracking down on minor infractions only led to recidivism, and that taking a more merciful approach to defendants made cities safer.

“When you look at who he defined himself to be, it wasn’t about Trump. It was an approach to the justice system that was fair, balanced and equitable,” said Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County, which includes Chicago, who campaigned on a platform similar to that of Bragg.

When Bragg took office, and his prosecutors were presenting evidence about Trump and his businesses to a grand jury, the new district attorney stopped them, concerned that the case, which centered on whether Trump fraudulently inflated the value of his properties, was not strong enough to move forward. The public backlash was swift.

In much the way that Trump shifted the conversation in Bragg’s campaign, the former president has shifted the focus of the district attorney’s administration. And Bragg will likely find that his tenure is now intertwined with the former president.

‘The Facts and the Law’

In an appearance on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show this month, Bragg, who declined to grant an interview for this article, was asked what figured into his decision to bring a case against any defendant.

“We’re looking at the facts and the law,” Bragg said, adding, “Yes, we live in this world where we may hear what this pundit says and we may hear all the commentary, but our focus is on the evidence and the law.”

That emphasis on the law is in part informed by Bragg’s time as a federal prosecutor in New York, where he focused on public corruption and white collar crime, and then at the New York attorney general’s office, where he led a unit focused on police accountability. He has long been uncomfortable with the more political aspects of his job.

“The second we start thinking we’re politicians, we’ve taken a real wrong turn,” Bragg said of prosecutors, in an interview with The New York Times early in his tenure

Bragg has been in a difficult situation. Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School and a former prosecutor in Manhattan, said that even though investigators do not target individuals for political reasons, politics does come into play in that “there is always a question of whether it is the public interest to bring a certain charge or not.”

If he does not bring a case even though there is clear evidence to prove it, Roiphe suggested, he could violate the long-standing principle that no person is above the law. But if he does indict Trump, who has begun a third presidential campaign, the choice could also be “incredibly destabilizing and harmful,” Roiphe said.

“I’m not envious of anyone who has to make a call,” she added.

Bragg’s prosecutors have homed in on the hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, which was made in the run-up to the 2016 election by Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen. Cohen was then reimbursed in installments by the then-president. The case is expected to center on Trump’s role in recording the reimbursements in the internal records of his company, the Trump Organization. The records falsely stated that the payments to Cohen were for “legal expenses.”

Trump has called Bragg a “racist” and accused him of leading a politically motivated prosecution. Trump’s political allies have joined his battle against the district attorney; on Sunday, the Republican speaker of the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy accused Bragg of “abusing his office to target President Trump.”

Bragg’s Republican general election opponent Thomas Kenniff, who works as a defense lawyer in Manhattan, expressed a similar concern in an interview Monday. Kenniff said that while he did not want to guess at Bragg’s motivations, a case focused on the hush money “should be unsettling to anyone, regardless of how much they despise a former president.”

“Prosecutorial discretion is and always has been part of the job and the cost of something like this, the divisiveness of something like this and the extent that it may undermine the office of the presidency, I think, makes it a very ill-advised choice,” Kenniff said.

Trump’s Long Shadow

Like many of the prosecutors who have orbited the former president, Bragg’s most high-profile moments have involved Trump. In December, he won a conviction of Trump’s family business on a yearslong tax fraud scheme, stemming from the company’s practice of giving out off-the-books perks to executives. It was the most significant victory of his young tenure.

In January, he impaneled a grand jury to hear evidence about . Trump’s involvement in the hush-money payment to Daniels, who in the weeks before the 2016 election was attempting to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. Trump has denied the encounter.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been scrutinizing the conduct around the hush-money payment on and off for nearly five years, and began to do so under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.

Trump, then president, fought the investigation at every turn, even as Vance broadened his focus to the business practices at the Tump Organization. When, in February 2021, Vance’s office finally obtained Trump’s tax returns after a lengthy court battle, the Manhattan inquiry into the former president gathered steam. That transformed the race in which Bragg had become a leading candidate.

Still, Bragg had other aims. Upon winning office, he said that his top two priorities were addressing the gun violence that had begun to spike in New York City during the pandemic, and sending fewer people from Manhattan to the troubled jail complex on Rikers Island.

Bragg was only briefed on the Trump investigation shortly before taking office. And his first action after being sworn in was to issue a memo in which he told his prosecutors to seek jail and prison time for only the most serious crimes.

While a draft of the memo had been released during his campaign to little fanfare, a sudden backlash to the new policies were the new district attorney’s first indication that running one of the most politically prominent prosecutor’s offices in the country would be different from campaigning for it.

And, inevitably, Trump became a central issue. Before leaving office, Vance had authorized the prosecutors leading the inquiry into Trump’s business practices to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury. But the decision to seek an indictment ultimately fell to Bragg. When he decided not to move forward, the two prosecutors leading the case, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, abruptly resigned.

What followed was a media tempest, as Bragg was attacked for not having brought a case. But the district attorney’s allies saw it as a validation of his judgment.

“It confirms that Alvin is very deliberate and methodical and not swayed by politics,” Sharpton said in a Monday interview. “If he indicts now, he has more credibility than probably anyone because he wasn’t playing to the crowd.”

Foxx said that the fact that Bragg wanted to do the work himself, she said, rather than inheriting a case he had not built, “absolutely played into his decision making.”

“You are at a disadvantage when running and talking about a case and the reality of it hits real hard when you have to go through the file,” said Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney.

Bragg shut down the grand jury presentation but continued with the inquiry, assuring the public that his team was “investigating thoroughly and following the facts.”

As the months went by and some of the attention receded, the team began to make apparent progress: By late summer, Bragg and some of his deputies had begun to indicate to associates that they were newly optimistic about building a case against Trump.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .