Alvin Bragg has been criticized by some for being soft on crime, but he may turn out to be very tough on one person: Donald Trump.
The 49-year-old Manhattan district attorney is reportedly ready to shake the national political firmament by bringing criminal charges against the former president as soon as this week for his alleged role in a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to cover up her story of their affair.
In his brief time in office, Bragg has been a political football for conservatives critical of so-called woke criminal-justice reforms, and who have tried to paint him as an anti-police prosecutor who is rolling out the red carpet for the kind of rampant criminality New York once wallowed in.
The Margin: ‘Woke’ is being used to describe everything and nothing. What does it actually mean?
Despite that, Bragg has not shied away from what would be the most politically-charged decision he may ever face — indicting a former president, especially one as polarizing as Trump.
The Stormy Daniels case is one of two major investigations into Trump that Bragg inherited from his predecessor, Cy Vance, when he was elected in 2021.
In the other, a long-running probe into alleged financial malfeasance at Trump’s real-estate business, Bragg opted not to charge the ex-president, although he did extract a guilty plea out of the company’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who was sentenced to five months in prison. New York state’s attorney general, Leticia James, also brought sweeping civil charges against Trump and his family based on much of the same information.
Bragg’s decision not to charge Trump in that case drew criticism from some Democrats, and two of the prosecutors in the investigation resigned as a result, saying they believed there had been ample evidence to bring charges. Bragg, however, said he thought the evidence wasn’t strong enough for a conviction.
Trump has said he expects to be charged in the Stormy Daniels case on Tuesday. He has dismissed the probe as politically motivated and has called on his supporters to protest if he is arrested. Bragg has said he will not allow his office to be intimidated by threats.
A veteran prosecutor and civil-rights attorney, Bragg is the first Black person to serve as Manhattan’s district attorney.
He won the general election handily in 2021 in Democrat-heavy Manhattan, after a crowded Democratic primary in which he received 32% of the vote, edging out his closest competitor by just four points.
After taking office in 2022, Bragg found himself immediately in conservative crosshairs when he announced several new approaches to prosecution such as declining to pursue low-level offenses, like fare-beating and prostitution, unless the suspect also committed a felony.
Progressives have welcomed Bragg’s effort to rethink how best to tackle crime and lessen the conveyor belt of low-level offenders to the city’s notoriously tough jails.
In his own defense, Bragg, who grew up in the Harlem section of Manhattan, has explained that he has tried to bring the perspective of more highly impacted communities to the job. He has noted that he, himself, has been the subject of three gunpoint stops by police in his life.
Before becoming the Manhattan district attorney, Bragg served as the chief deputy attorney general for the state of New York under Eric Schneiderman, overseeing lawsuits against the Trump organization and Harvey Weinstein and his film company.
Before that, Bragg worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, where he focused on white-collar crime. Previously, he worked as an investigator for the New York City Council, following a prior stint in the attorney general’s office.
After winning the Democratic primary in 2021, Bragg, who received undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, acknowledged the huge scope of the job he would ultimately take, but said his responsibility would extend beyond just investigating Trump.
“We’re also talking about the gun-trafficking issues, the scope of the entire system and the collateral consequences,” he told the New York Times. “It’s all a profound responsibility.”
