Supporters urge Trump to jail Manhattan district attorney if re-elected

Donald Trump’s key supporters are urging him to prosecute and jail Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who led the criminal case resulting in his felony conviction, if the former president recaptures the White House in November.

The push to target Bragg, a Democrat, is being led by Steve Bannon, who served as Trump’s White House strategist early in his first term and is himself being prosecuted by the same district attorney over allegations that he defrauded donors to a scheme to fund a wall along the US-Mexico border.

It comes amid consistent signals from Trump that he plans to prosecute his political adversaries, including Joe Biden, if he returns to power. Republicans have further whetted Trump’s appetite for legal retribution by pushing the storyline that the Biden administration has “weaponised” the US justice department to deliberately persecute the ex-president.

“Of course [Bragg] should be – and will be – jailed,” Bannon told Axios .

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He said Bragg could be prosecuted under the US constitution’s 14th amendment, which guarantees equal rights, the fourth amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and government property seizures, and “scores of other laws”.

Bannon compared the aggressive tactics to be pursued by a putative second Trump administration to “the evolution of any war” the US has fought in its history, including the war of independence, the civil war and the first and second world wars.

“They only get nastier over time,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly denounced Bragg for pursuing the state case that found the ex-president guilty last week on all 34 felony counts of falsifying documents to conceal the payment of hush money to an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels, to help him win the 2016 presidential election.

The district attorney has yet to say whether he will call for a jail term in advance of a sentencing hearing scheduled for 11 July. That date is notably four days before the Republican national convention, where Trump is due to be formally adopted as the party’s presidential candidate.

Bannon’s comments on Bragg were echoed more broadly by Trump himself on Tuesday in an interview with the rightwing Newsmax channel in which he accused his political opponents of forcing him to take revenge by unjustly prosecuting him.

“It’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to, and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them,” Trump said, referring to last week’s conviction, which he has falsely claimed was ordered by Biden. “Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question.”

Trump is known to be hunting for a Maga (Make America great again) committed loyalist to serve in his administration as attorney general if he triumphs in November. He presumably hopes to avoid a repeat of his first appointee to the post, Jeff Sessions, whom he fired for recusing himself from an investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“If you get the right person, it’s like magic,” he told Fox & Friends in an interview last weekend. “It’s like in real estate: you know, you put a good super in a building, the building runs well. You put a bad one in, it doesn’t.”

Trump, who faces 54 other criminal charges relating to trying to overturn the 2020 presidential result, retaining classified documents and alleged election interference in Georgia, has spoken at various points of pursuing his political opponents through the courts – a tactic the Republicans have termed as “lawfare”.

At the start of his 2024 presidential campaign, he pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Biden.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” he said after being arraigned by special prosecutor Jack Smith on charges of keeping classified documents from his time in the White House.

Another special prosecutor was appointed by the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to investigate Biden on similar charges but concluded that the president had not deliberately committed a crime.

On Tuesday, Garland adopted a defiant stance testifying before the Republican-led House of Representatives judiciary committee. He accused GOP congressional members of peddling conspiracy theories and pushing false narratives by alleging that the justice department had directed the prosecution of Trump that led to last week’s felony conviction.

Bragg, an elected New York state official, does not work under the authority of the justice department, which is a federal agency.