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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appears on the verge of bringing an unprecedented criminal case against former President Donald Trump — after crowing on the campaign trail that he’d be the best person to do it.
The Democratic DA repeatedly touted his experience suing Trump, 76, while serving as the state’s chief deputy attorney general from 2017 to 2018, leading to the shutdown of the Donald J. Trump Foundation and payment of $2 million in court-ordered damages.
“I certainly have more experience with [Trump] than most people in the world,” then-candidate Bragg told The Wall Street Journal in April 2021.
At a December 2020 Democratic candidates forum, Bragg also pointed to the foundation case as a key reason for him to inherit a probe of Trump that was opened by outgoing Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr., The New York Times reported.
“I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation,” Bragg said. “I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.”
Bragg also boasted, “It is a fact that I have sued Trump more than a hundred times.”
“I can’t change that fact, nor would I. That was important work. That’s separate from anything that the DA’s office may be looking at now,” he added.
Bragg’s campaign rhetoric led to pushback from rival Democrat Tali Farhadian Weinstein, whose spokeswoman accused him of attacking Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets,” the Times said.
But following his election, Bragg, who took office Jan. 1, 2022, again invoked his experience suing Trump in response to the stunning resignations of prosecutors Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, who had led the Trump investigation until clashing with their new boss.
