Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg to face his toughest trial yet as Trump criminal case begins
CNN
A few weeks after being elected Manhattan’s top prosecutor, Alvin Bragg sat in a Harlem café bullishly explaining how he planned to balance his reformist priorities for the borough with the infamously knotty task of confronting former President Donald Trump in court.
A few weeks after being elected Manhattan’s top prosecutor, Alvin Bragg sat in a Harlem café bullishly explaining how he planned to balance his reformist priorities for the borough with the infamously knotty task of confronting former President Donald Trump in court. “I’ve done a lot of cases that are considered no-win,” Bragg told CNN at the time, in December 2021. “I think going into most of those cases people were like, ‘Ooh, you’re gonna get a lot of heat however it comes out.’ That’s the job.” About 15 months later, on April 4, 2023, Bragg and his team of prosecutors stepped into that white-hot spotlight by indicting Trump on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments delivered to quiet a sex scandal ahead of the 2016 president election. Bragg sat in in the courtroom as Trump was arraigned on the charges. After a little more than a year of legal wrangling, pundits’ clashing over the strength of his case and a tabloid backlash to his progressive politics, Trump’s criminal trial – the first of its kind for a former American president – is set to begin on Monday in New York City. Bragg is now facing up to what many of his peers and other outside observers would describe as the textbook definition of a “no-win” assignment. His decision to prosecute Trump came under immediate, searing scrutiny from all quarters. Democrats largely viewed him as brave, even if they worried over the political implications of the case, while Republicans immediately cast the 50-year-old Harlem native as a craven opportunist acting on what Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan described as “blatant political animus toward former President Trump.” Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, Bragg carries an estimable legal resume but none of the blue-blood pedigree enjoyed by his two predecessors, Cy Vance Jr. and Robert Morgenthau, whose fathers served in presidential administrations. Morgenthau first won the job in 1974. Vance took over in 2010. Previous occupants Charles Seymour Whitman and Thomas Dewey went on to become governors of New York. Dewey twice won the GOP presidential nomination, though he fell memorably shy of the White House on both occasions. Bragg, a Harvard-educated attorney, previously served in roles including assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York; a top lawyer in the New York attorney general’s office, as a civil rights lawyer; and as a professor and co-director of the New York Law School Racial Justice Project, where he represented family members of the late Eric Garner in a lawsuit against the city. Garner was killed in 2014 after a plainclothes police officer placed him in an unauthorized chokehold following a dispute over his allegedly hawking loose cigarettes.
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