In his first three months as the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg had an unusual number of bad days. Feb. 23 was among the worst.
That day, the two prosecutors leading his office’s inquiry into Donald J. Trump resigned over a disagreement about whether to seek criminal charges against the former president. After one of the prosecutors’ resignation letters leaked, an uproar ensued. Soon, Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, was being attacked by many in his own party and pilloried by late night comedians.
For Mr. Bragg, it was just the latest crisis: He had already been the subject of intense criticism from the other side of the political spectrum, after a memo he released in his first days on the job announced, in complex legalese, that the office would cease to seek jail and prison time for all but the most serious crimes.
Between the backlash to the memo and the fallout from the Trump investigation, Mr. Bragg managed, in less than 12 weeks, an unlikely feat: He united the New York Post’s editorial board and the viewers of MSNBC in a posture of mutual disdain. Rarely has a politician become a piñata so quickly.
The two instances have defined the early days of Mr. Bragg’s chaotic tenure, during which political clumsiness has hamstrung his attempts to overhaul the office. In each, Mr. Bragg appeared to make a decision on principle: That the office should not bring cases unjustly, or prosecute them when he does not believe the facts merit it.
But in each case, the principle behind the decision was overshadowed by the severity of the reaction, undermining the new district attorney’s long-held ambitions to change the criminal justice system in Manhattan.
In an interview on the day the Trump prosecutors resigned, Mr. Bragg expressed a desire to put his head down and do the work of the office. He hopes that driving down gun violence and the population at Rikers while pushing ahead on the Trump investigation — which he insisted this week was continuing — will “neutralize” the noise around him. Elected prosecutors, Mr. Bragg said, should not act as politicians in the traditional sense of the word.
“The second we start thinking we’re politicians, we’ve taken a real wrong turn,” Mr. Bragg said.
But in interviews with more than 20 people closely tracking the district attorney, critics and supporters alike suggested that Mr. Bragg’s failure to engage with the political realities of his office jeopardized his chances of accomplishing his goals.
“I think that as a first-time elected official, there’s been a rocky adjustment to go from campaigning to actually doing the job,” said Daniel S. Goldman, who was a federal prosecutor in the same office as Mr. Bragg and later led the first impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump.
“That transition has been bumpy for Alvin and I think that when you get off to a bad start, it’s very difficult to get back on the right track,” Mr. Goldman said. “And I think what he’s hoping is that he’ll focus on doing the work and ultimately people will see that the policies he’s implemented will be productive.”
‘A really hard conversation to have’
When Mr. Bragg began his campaign for district attorney in June 2019, crime in New York City was hovering near a historic low, the pandemic was nine months away from pummeling the city and Mr. Trump had yet to be impeached even once.
But by the time he took office, gun violence had risen sharply and the city was enduring yet another surge of Covid cases.
Mr. Bragg had won by emphasizing the need for a balance between public safety and making the justice system more fair. As he began his tenure, though, many New Yorkers were far more focused on the first plank of his platform.
“He’s trying to have a conversation about undoing some really unjust policies in the height of crime spikes and a global pandemic and feelings of unease,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor at Fordham.
That is a difficult conversation to have, she said, particularly with some white voters who might be more comfortable with a progressive approach to criminal justice in theory than in practice.
Much of the campaign for district attorney was conducted over Zoom, and the other candidates were, for the most part, as new to politics as Mr. Bragg himself.
A former law professor and Sunday school teacher, Mr. Bragg embodied both roles when speaking in those forums: He listened thoughtfully, and, when it was his turn, he spoke in paragraphs, often interrupting or editing himself in the middle of a sentence.
He has remained calm and deliberative in his days in office, even as the pressure on him has ramped up. His response to questions about the Trump investigation in February was characteristic: “There’s a part of me, the non-lawyer part, that wants to have a conversation,” he said. “But the part that’s been a career prosecutor tells me I can’t.”
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutorial philosophy is roughly similar to that of others who were elected during the Trump presidency and vowed to fight racism and injustice in the criminal legal system.
But in New York this year, prominent elected officials have taken a more moderate stance on criminal justice policy. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams both pushed, successfully, for changes to the 2019 overhaul of the state’s bail law. Mr. Adams has reintroduced a troubled anti-gun unit to the streets of New York.
“The whole criminal justice reform movement is very much on the defensive,” said Janos Marton, a former candidate for Manhattan district attorney who endorsed Mr. Bragg after dropping out of the race.
In testimony to the City Council last month, Mr. Bragg outlined his priorities: He said his office would identify and prosecute the people driving gun violence in Manhattan, form a dedicated hate crimes unit to deal with a sharp rise in targeted attacks, and strengthen a unit that reviews the office’s convictions to guard against wrongful imprisonment.
Perhaps the fullest realization of Mr. Bragg’s campaign promises has come with the announcement of a new division dedicated to diverting defendants away from jail or prison and toward supportive services. Mr. Bragg has said that he believes in the value of such work to thwart recidivism and put troubled individuals on a better path.
But the rise in shootings and Mr. Bragg’s stumbles may have hurt his chances of realizing his agenda. In early February he clarified his first-week memo, which implemented the policies he had announced on the campaign trail, saying his prosecutors were not bound by his guidance and were free to determine the course of their cases.
“The most disappointing thing was how quickly he seemed to cave to this prevailing, fear-mongering narrative,” said Amanda Jack, a member of 5 Boro Defenders, a coalition of public defenders.
She said that during the campaign, Mr. Bragg had been “able to please all sides, which we were always a little bit suspicious of but hopeful. But now I’m suspicious of it and feeling a little cynical.”
An investigation with an uncertain future
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is the country’s highest-profile local prosecutor’s office — a distinction sharpened by the high-stakes investigation into Mr. Trump.
For three years, the office had investigated whether the 45th president had committed a crime, an inquiry that in its later stages focused on whether Mr. Trump misrepresented the value of his assets.
Mark F. Pomerantz, a respected veteran prosecutor who came out of retirement to work on the investigation, felt confident that the investigators could prove it.
Before leaving office in December, Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., directed Mr. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, another prosecutor running the investigation, to proceed with a grand jury presentation against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bragg was less sure that the office had the necessary evidence. In a series of meetings, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne attempted to convince Mr. Bragg to change his mind. He did not.
A month later The New York Times published Mr. Pomerantz’s resignation letter, in which the prosecutor said he believed that Mr. Trump was guilty of numerous felonies and that declining to hold him accountable would be a “grave failure of justice.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly described the investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt,” and in a statement on Friday accused Manhattan prosecutors of misconduct orchestrated by the Democratic Party.
For weeks, Mr. Bragg made no public comment. But on Thursday, he broke his silence, releasing a statement on the investigation and giving a number of interviews to news outlets.
He said that the inquiry was ongoing and told The Times that his office had interviewed new witnesses and was looking at new evidence.
He was eager to explain in detail why he felt he couldn’t reveal more — citing both the principles of the law and his ethical obligation — and did not discuss at length the dispute that led the two prosecutors to resign.
The true status of the investigation remains difficult to discern. Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz thought that their case was strong enough to bring to the grand jury in February. It is unclear what kind of evidence would convince Mr. Bragg to do the same, or whether his office is on the path to obtaining such evidence.
Mr. Bragg vowed that he would be transparent about his final decision on whether or not to indict Mr. Trump. Prosecutors with experience in the district attorney’s office said it was not only appropriate but necessary for him to do so.
“He owes it to the public to stand up and to tell us the truth,” said Robert Gottlieb, who was an assistant district attorney in the 1970s in Manhattan.
But Mr. Bragg said that while he understood the desire for more clarity about the current state of the investigation, he was ambivalent about commenting at all. He also expressed concern that he was not being taken at his word.
“I understand the public wanting information here,” he said. “I also want the public to have faith when the district attorney says something’s happening.”
A long term ahead
Some of Mr. Bragg’s supporters believe that as the first Black person to lead the office, he is at a disadvantage.
The Rev. Al Sharpton said he had heard repeatedly from listeners who call in to his radio show that they continue to stand with Mr. Bragg, and believe his critics are “looking for any reason to jump on Alvin because they never wanted to see a Black man sit in this coveted seat.”
“If he was not secure on whether or not he could get a conviction, then he shouldn’t have proceeded,” Mr. Sharpton said of Mr. Bragg’s decision on the Trump investigation.
“The worst thing in the world would be for the first Black D.A. of Manhattan,” he added, “to prosecute for the first time in American history, a former president of the United States and lose the case on a global stage.”
Barring extraordinary circumstances, Mr. Bragg will lead the district attorney’s office for at least another three years and eight months, and those who only know him for the Trump case or the Day One memo will have a longer record to assess.
“Can he recover? This is early days,” said Daniel R. Alonso, a former top deputy to Mr. Vance, said in late March. “He hasn’t even finished his third month.”
Mr. Vance declined to comment on Mr. Bragg’s choices. He knows how difficult it can be to take over the decision-making, and how unhelpful it is when your predecessors second-guess your work.
But he did say he understood Mr. Bragg’s impulse toward letting that work speak for itself, and his hope to be viewed holistically.
“You want to be judged by the totality of your work,” Mr. Vance said. “But that’s not easy to do in a city like New York and a county like Manhattan.”
Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
