NEW YORK — When Alvin Bragg Taking over as Manhattan district attorney in 2022, he surprised the public and his own team by halting an investigation into former President Donald Trump that appeared to be headed toward an indictment.
Two top prosecutors were so upset by the decision that they resigned. One called Bragg’s hesitation to file a lawsuit against Trump “a serious miscarriage of justice.”
Now, Bragg has cemented his place in history as the first prosecutor to win a criminal conviction of a former US president.
Speaking after Thursday’s verdict, Bragg summed up his role by saying simply: “I did my job.”
“Our job is to follow the facts and the law without fear or favor, and that’s exactly what we did here,” he told reporters.
Trump and his supporters insist that Bragg, a Democrat, had a revenge against the former president and presumptive Republican candidate. He relentlessly accused Bragg of fabricating a baseless case for political reasons.
Here’s a look at Bragg’s history, his time in office and his history regarding Trump.
Bragg, 50, grew up in Harlem when New York City struggled with high crime. He once had a knife held to his throat and spoke about being held at gunpoint six times growing up, including three times by police officers.
When he was 15, a police officer pointed a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer while the teenager was walking to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint about the incident.
Bragg graduated from Harvard Law School. He began his career as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, 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 disputes with Trump.
Bragg was a senior attorney in the state attorney general’s office in 2018 when it was embroiled in several battles with Trump, relating both to his White House policies and the management of his private charitable foundation. Bragg directly oversaw a lawsuit against the foundation. trump sat downagreeing to dissolve the foundation, 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.
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 a predominantly Democratic Manhattan, a year after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police kicked off a national reckoning over how the criminal justice system has treated black people and other people of color. color. Bragg, who is black, worked as a prosecutor but had personal experience with over-policing of the city’s black community.
He was also, he suggested at the time, well positioned to take over the criminal investigation into Trump and his company from Cyrus Vance Jr., the outgoing prosecutor.
During the race, Bragg was repeatedly asked how he would handle the investigation. His standard response was to cite his work on Trump-related lawsuits while he was in the attorney general’s office and his willingness to hold powerful figures accountable.
“I don’t know where this investigation is going. I don’t want to prejudge this. But, I’ve been involved in these types of investigations — white-collar investigations — for years, both doing them myself and supervising them,” Bragg told The Associated Press at the time.
Vance’s investigation then focused on whether Trump had committed fraud by lying about the value of his assets in financial statements provided to banks and others.
After winning the primary, Bragg sailed to victory in the general elections.
Bragg became Manhattan’s first black district attorney in January 2022. He was questioned about his approach to the job almost from the start.
One of his first steps was a memo that, among other things, instructed prosecutors not to seek prison time for some low-level offenses, such as low-level possession and sale of marijuana (the state later legalized such possession) and charge some armed robberies in commercial settings as petty theft.
Law enforcement leaders, conservative media and some centrist Democrats have accused him of being soft on criminals during the pandemic-era crime spike. Bragg’s team said the memo was mischaracterized, but his office later rolled back parts of the directive.
During the 2022 gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Lee Zeldin promised that, if elected, he would seek to remove Bragg from office.
Bragg faced criticism again this year when he refused to seek pre-trial detention for some accused men of fighting with police officers in Times Square.
The decision drew criticism from Governor Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat. Bragg defended himself, telling reporters, “the only thing worse than not bringing perpetrators to justice would be ensnaring innocent people in the criminal justice system.”
His investigators later determined that several men initially arrested played only a minor role in the fight or were not even there.
Bragg’s most surprising initial move as district attorney was to suspend the investigation into whether Trump had lied on financial statements.
The lead prosecutor in that investigation, Mark Pomerantz, resigned in anger.
But the investigation is not over. It was just changing.
In 2022, Bragg’s office convinced former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg to plead guilty to tax evasion over fringe benefits, including a luxury car and a rent-free apartment. Later that year, the prosecutor’s office obtained a conviction of Trump’s company on similar tax charges.
Emboldened by these victories, Bragg convened another 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 derailing his 2016 presidential bid. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
A jury convicted Trump of those charges on Thursday.
Trump and his allies have criticized Bragg as a partisan masquerading as a prosecutor, claiming he brought the case only to hurt Trump’s chances of winning back the White House.
trump called Bragg an “animal” and a “degenerate psychopath,” once posted on social media of himself holding a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg and described him on Friday as “a failed prosecutor.”
He ignored Trump’s accusations.
“Lots of voices out there,” Bragg said Thursday. “The only voice that matters is the voice of the jury. And the jury has spoken.
