The criminal conviction of former President Donald Trump has remained the top priority on Democrats’ agenda for seven years. So naturally, any prosecutor who could accomplish such a feat would become an immediate folk hero to the American left, which today encompasses legacy media.
Trump warned followers in a weekend post on Truth Social that his arrest could come Tuesday. On Monday night, the eve of Trump’s speculated arrest date, Politico published a glossy profile of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is pursuing a potential indictment of the former president over payments apparently made on Trump’s behalf to onscreen prostitute Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors in Bragg’s office accuse the president of improperly recording the payments as legal expenses.
New York Times, Politico Cover for Bragg amid Outcry
News of Trump’s possible imprisonment drew immediate backlash from those concerned about the precedent for self-governance that the arrest of a political enemy would set. The former president encouraged followers to respond with protest.
“TAKE OUR NATION BACK,” Trump wrote.
The post provoked The New York Times to make a comparison to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when the president encouraged supporters to protest “peacefully” before a joint session of Congress was interrupted by demonstrators.
“Trump Claims His Arrest Is Imminent and Calls for Protests, Echoing Jan. 6,” headlined The New York Times.
The first police barricades were breached well before the president finished speaking at the White House.
Trump’s Republican rivals condemned the potential indictment of their political opponent.
“The idea of indicting a former president of the United States is deeply troubling to me as it is to tens of millions of Americans,” said former Vice President Mike Pence, who is reportedly preparing to jump in the 2024 Republican primary.
“It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals,” said tech investor and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pledged a congressional investigation into the Manhattan district attorney’s politicized probe.
“I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” McCarthy said.
As Federalist D.C. Columnist Eddie Scarry pointed out Monday, Bragg only recently decided to bring back the case surrounding Daniels after all prior prosecutions of Trump failed to capture the former president’s criminal indictment.
“While Trump was in office and Bragg was a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, his office looked at this very case and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing,” Scarry wrote. “It’s a horse that has been beaten to death, resuscitated, and beaten again. Then smacked on the rear one more time.”
Despite the clear political motives that would be laid bare if Bragg went through with the unprecedented arrest of a former president over an old and discarded investigation, Politico branded the Manhattan district attorney as a “low-key, politics-averse prosecutor.”
“According to those who know Bragg, he is, occasionally to his detriment, uninterested in political calculations and generally indifferent to the types of public-relations offenses Trump likes to wage,” Politico gushed.
An honest examination of Bragg’s past, however, reveals a much different character.
A Leftist Activist Masquerading as a White Knight Prosecutor
When campaigning for one of the highest-profile prosecutor offices in the country, Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, pointed to his past pursuit of Trump’s prosecution as a primary pillar of his resume.
“Bragg often reminded voters on the campaign trail that he helped sue the Trump administration ‘more than a hundred times’ as a deputy in the New York state attorney general’s office,” Reuters reported in 2021.
Bragg’s own prominent supporters amplified the attorney’s ability to pursue Trump in court as a reason to vote for him.
“Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump,” read The New York Times in July 2021.
Bragg also ran for his current office with heavy financial support from left-wing billionaire financier George Soros. A super PAC backed by Soros, Color of Change, pledged to bankroll Bragg’s campaign with a seven-figure sum in the spring of 2021. Soon after the cash infusion, the committee pulled back $500,000 of the donation when Bragg faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
While Bragg pursues Trump’s arrest, the district attorney has unleashed violent criminals on New York City streets by refusing to seek jail time for robbery, assault, and gun possession cases. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, Soros admitted to backing candidates who promised to be soft on crime, branded as “reform prosecutors.” Bragg has held up to the pledge.
In January last year, Bragg reduced armed robbery charges to a misdemeanor for an ex-convict who threatened a drugstore owner with a knife. Last summer, Bragg freed a 16-year-old suspect who was allegedly filmed beating a New York City police officer.
While Bragg has gone soft on violent criminals, the Manhattan D.A. tried to throw the book at a bodega owner who stabbed an ex-convict in a clear act of self-defense caught on tape. Bragg initially sought to charge then-61-year-old Jose Alba with second-degree murder and sent the defendant to Riker’s Island for five days. The case was eventually dropped following public outcry, and Alba has since moved to the Dominican Republic.
According to The New York Times, major crime spiked 22 percent during Bragg’s first year. Bragg’s tenure has resulted in a city of rampant lawlessness overseen by a prosecutor laser-focused on political prosecutions.
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