New York (AP) — Alvin Bragg took office on Saturday as Manhattan’s first black district attorney and has already made one historic first notch. Now he is considering something else. Whether to make Donald Trump the first former president to be charged with crime.
As a district attorney, Bragg inherited an investigation of Trump and his business practices from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr. He refused to seek reelection 12 years later in a high-profile job last year.
After weeks of speculation about whether Vance would smash his tenure by prosecuting Trump, the former DA was a 48-year-old civil rights lawyer and former federal swearing at a private ceremony. I gave it to Prosecutor Bragg, partly because of COVID-19 concerns.
Bragg told CNN last month that he would be directly involved in the Trump issue. He also said he had asked two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance, Callie Dunne of the general counsel and Mark Pomeranz, a former mafia prosecutor, to continue to see it.
“This is clearly a consequential case and is DA’s noteworthy,” Bragg told CNN.
As a result of the investigation, Trump organization Trump Organization and its longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were indicted last summer. In the fall, Vance summoned a new grand jury to hear evidence of the incident.
Trump himself remains under investigation by the office after Vance led a multi-year battle to access Republican tax records.
As Chief Attorney General of the State of New York in 2018, Bragg filed a proceeding leading to the closure of Trump’s Charity Foundation against allegations that he used nonprofits to promote political and business interests. Assisted the supervision of.
Bragg defeated Republican Thomas Kenif in November after winning an eight-way Democratic primary in the spring amid a rising wave of progressive and reform-minded prosecutors across the country.
Bragg partially campaigned with a promise Changing the culture of the district attorney. Taking advantage of his own experience growing up in Harlem during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, Bragg said he wanted to “shrink the system” and refused to pursue many low-level crimes, small. I searched for an alternative way to prosecute a “crime of poverty”.
At the age of 15, police officers stabbed a gun in his face and mistakenly accused him of being a drug dealer while walking to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at the recommendation of his parents, arousing interest in the law.
He had a knife in his throat. As an adult, he opened his house to his brother-in-law, who had just been released from prison. From time to time, Bragg says a squad of warrants appeared in search of his brother-in-law, knocked on the door, and woke up his children.
Bragg spent the last day of the campaign participating in a rare judicial inquiry into Eric Garner’s suffocation. 2014 problem protesters. Bragg called it the most “emotionally important” incident of his career.
Mr Bragg, who was elected DA, said voters gave him “deep trust.”
“The basic role of the district attorney is to ensure both fairness and security,” Bragg told supporters on election night.
“It’s the trust given to me in the vote, but given to all of us-that’s what we’ve been working on-pairing partnerships between cities and countries, pairing fairness and security. To show the model. “