NEW YORK (AP) — When Alvin Bragg took office as Manhattan district attorney in 2022, he stunned the public and his own staff by pausing an investigation into former President Donald Trump that appeared headed for an indictment.
Two top prosecutors were so angry about the decision that they quit. One of them called Bragg’s hesitation to file a case against Trump “a serious failure of justice.”
Now Bragg has cemented his place in history as the first prosecutor to win a criminal conviction against a former U.S. president.
After Thursday’s ruling, Bragg summed up his role by simply saying, “I did my job.”
“Our job is to follow the facts and the law without fear or favor, and that is exactly what we have done here,” he told reporters.
Trump and his supporters maintain that Bragg, a Democrat, had a vendetta against the former president and presumptive Republican nominee. He has mercilessly accused Bragg of making up a baseless case for political reasons.
Here’s a look at Bragg’s background, his time in office, and his history with Trump.
A CHILD OF HARLEM
Bragg, 50, grew up in Harlem when New York City was struggling with high crime. He once had a knife held to his throat and has said that he was held at gunpoint six times during his youth, including three times by police officers.
When he was 15, a cop stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer while the teen went grocery shopping for his father. Bragg has filed a complaint about the incident.
Bragg subsequently graduated from Harvard Law School. He began his career as a criminal and civil rights attorney, then moved to the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and then worked in the New York attorney general’s office, where he had his first legal battle with Trump.
REQUEST TRUMP
Bragg was a senior attorney at the attorney general’s office in 2018, when it was embroiled in multiple battles with Trump, both related to his policies in the White House and his stewardship of his private charitable foundation. Bragg directly oversaw a lawsuit against the foundation. Trump settled and agreed to the foundation’s dissolution, and a judge fined him $2 million.
Bragg left the attorney general’s office at the end of 2018 and became a professor at New York Law School.
DISTRICT LAWYER CAMPAIGN
Bragg ran for Manhattan district attorney in 2021, campaigning on a platform of “justice and public safety” in a crowded Democratic primary.
In some ways, he was the perfect candidate for predominantly Democratic Manhattan, a year after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis started a national reckoning with how the criminal justice system has treated Black people and others of color. Bragg, who is black, had worked as a prosecutor but had personal experience with over-policing the city’s black community.
He also suggested at the time that he was well positioned to take over the criminal investigation into Trump and his company from Cyrus Vance Jr., the outgoing district attorney.
During the race, Bragg was repeatedly asked how he would approach the investigation. His standard response was to cite his work on Trump-related lawsuits while in the attorney general’s office and his willingness to hold powerful figures accountable.
“I don’t know where this investigation will go. I don’t want to get ahead of it. But I have been involved in these types of investigations — white-collar investigations — for years, both conducting them myself and also overseeing them,” Bragg told The Associated Press at the time.
Vance’s investigation then focused on whether Trump committed fraud by lying about the value of his assets on financial statements provided to banks and others.
After winning the primary, Bragg cruised to victory in the general election.
COLLISIONS OVER CRIME
Bragg became Manhattan’s first black district attorney in January 2022. Almost from the start he was challenged about his approach to the job.
One of his first moves was a memo instructing prosecutors, among other things, not to seek prison time for some low-level offenses, such as the possession and sale of petty marijuana (the state later legalized such possession) and to stop some armed robberies in to sue the country. commercial establishments as well as petty theft.
Police leaders, conservative media and some centrist Democrats accused him of going soft on criminals during a pandemic-era crime spike. Bragg’s staff said the memo was mischaracterized, but his office later walked back parts of the directive.
During the 2022 gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Lee Zeldin promised that if elected, he would try to remove Bragg from office.
Bragg faced renewed criticism this year when he refused to seek pretrial detention for several men accused of brawling with police officers in Times Square.
The decision drew criticism from Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat. Defending himself, Bragg told reporters: “The only thing worse than failing to bring perpetrators to justice would be innocent people being caught up in the criminal justice system.”
His investigators later determined that several men initially arrested played only minor roles in the battle or were not even there.
INVESTIGATE TRUMP
Bragg’s most surprising early move as prosecutor was dropping the investigation into whether Trump had lied about financial statements.
The lead prosecutor on that investigation, Mark Pomerantz, resigned in anger.
But the investigation was not over yet. It was just changing.
In 2022, Bragg’s office convinced longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to plead guilty to evading taxes on benefits including a luxury car and a rent-free apartment. Later that year, the district attorney’s office won a conviction against Trump’s company for similar tax charges.
Encouraged by those victories, Bragg convened a new grand jury, which indicted Trump in April 2023 on charges that he falsified records at his company to conceal a scheme to pay hush money to prevent a sex scandal from endangering his bid for president would harm in 2016. denied any wrongdoing.
A jury convicted Trump on these charges on Thursday.
TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON BRAGG
Trump and his allies have branded Bragg as a partisan in the guise of a prosecutor, claiming he filed the case solely to damage Trump’s chances of regaining the White House.
Trump has called Bragg an “animal” and a “degenerate psychopath,” once posted a social media post showing him holding a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg, and described him Friday as “a failed prosecutor.”
He has shrugged off Trump’s accusations.
“There are a lot of voices,” Bragg said Thursday. “The only vote that matters is the jury’s vote. And the jury has spoken.”
