Alvin Bragg’s long road to indicting Trump began in Manhattan’s neighborhoods

BY NICK GARBER

Before Alvin Bragg was catapulted into the national spotlight for indicting Donald Trump, he rst had to get elected Manhattan district attorney. Rather than presidential politics, his 2021 campaign dwelled largely on the issues plaguing Manhattan’s neighborhoods—gun violence, police misconduct, deed theft and drug abuse.

Campaigning on street corners and at farmers markets, Bragg described being shaped by Harlem, his lifelong home, where encounters with police and brushes with violence shaped his view of the criminal-justice system. e votes that propelled him to his close Democratic primary win—and put him in a position to indict a former president—came largely from his uptown base, as well as the Upper West Side and Greenwich Village.

Still, the Manhattan district attor- ney is no ordinary prosecutor, and the now-former president loomed over the campaign, given the ofce’s pending investigation of the Trump Organization. Bragg, a former state and federal prosecutor, often boasted of having sued Trump “more than a hundred times” in his previous roles. ose included a series of state probes between 2017 and 2018, when Bragg served in the New York attorney general’s o ce and assisted in the investigation that ultimately dissolved Trump’s charitable foundation.

Proceeding with caution

In liberal Manhattan, voters have long been tantalized by the prospect of a Trump arrest. But Bragg and his seven Democratic Party rivals had to be careful of prejudicing a future case by talking about the president too directly.

Indeed, his chief rival, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, vowed to take a more “judicious approach” in her own campaign. She criticized Bragg’s rhetoric, telling e New York Times that he attacked Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets.” ursday’s indictment, instead, was based on alleged hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels—a long-running probe that prosecutors within Bragg’s o ce refer to as the “zombie case,” e Wall Street Journal reported.

After taking o ce in 2022, Bragg, as expected, took over the existing investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. He won a 17-count tax fraud conviction against the company in December, and its former chief nancial o cer was sentenced to jail.

But Bragg faced internal turmoil earlier last year for pausing an investigation of whether Trump had committed crimes by misstating his nancial assets. at prompted the high-pro le departures of the two prosecutors who had led that criminal case, and it left Bragg open to criticism from across the political spectrum.

Along the way Bragg has become a boogeyman to conservatives and a target of violent threats, though his allies in the city have lionized him. He has come a long way from his block-by-block campaign two years ago.

“We do not know what will happen with investigations in other jurisdictions,” said Upper Manhattan Rep. Adriano Espaillat—a onetime supporter of Bragg’s primary rival—during a rally this week. “But we do know that New York City stands in solidarity with Alvin Bragg, a son of Harlem.” ■