Bragg, Alvin

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      A Trump Case Awaits. Who Is the Best Prosecutor for the Job?

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      Some candidates for Manhattan’s district attorney are agents of change who want to cut the police budget. Others are very comfortable with long-established established power networks.During its 20 year run, “Law & Order” cast five different actors in the role of Manhattan district attorney, a rate of turnover that feels like science fiction given that, in reality, four people have been elected to the office in 83 years. For the past 46 of them, the position, one of the most important prosecutorial posts in the country, has been held by two people, each an aristocrat born to a political dynasty: First, Robert M. Morgenthau, son of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as treasury secretary under two presidents (and who was himself the son of the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire); and since 2010, Cy Vance, son of the former secretary of state for whom he is named.In three weeks, Manhattanites will have the opportunity to vote for someone new at a pivotal moment in the history of race and social reform, during a period when leading prosecutors around the country — in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston — have been on the vanguard of the movement to reduce incarceration. The stakes would suggest a certain amount of heat, but engagement with the election has been strikingly low. In a recent poll of likely Democratic voters living in Manhattan, 44 percent said that they did not know whom they would vote for among the eight available D.A. candidates.The contender who has received the most attention is the one who has spent the most money to get it. Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a highly qualified prosecutor, leads the field in two areas: financing, having raised close to $4.5 million, an astonishing sum for a race of this kind, and the elite credentials that often make that possible. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, a Rhodes scholar who clerked for Merrick B. Garland and Sandra Day O’Connor, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has been, among other things, a chief adviser to Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney known for his reform work around bail, juvenile justice and diverting low-level drug offenders from the prison system.With the exception of Elizabeth Crotty, who is running a campaign so traditionally focused on public safety that police unions can’t stop endorsing her, everyone else has produced a platform that lands somewhere along the spectrum of a contemporary progressive mandate. (There is a single Republican candidate, Thomas Kenniff, but Manhattan has not elected a Republican D.A. since Thomas E. Dewey in 1937.)The issue with Ms. Farhadian Weinstein is not that she lacks the sensitivities this particular moment is calling for; rather, she offers no break in the long and dubious tradition of handing the office over to those who live at the top of an intricately knit network of wealth and power, far from the ordinary realities.The wife of hedge-fund manager Boaz Weinstein, with whom she bought a $25.5 million Fifth Avenue apartment formerly belonging to the copper heiress Huguette Clark, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised tens of thousands of dollars from her husband’s friends and colleagues on Wall Street. (Among them is the billionaire Ken Griffin, who built his own stunning relationship to New York real estate when he bought a condominium on Central Park South for $238 million, at the time the most expensive home ever sold in the United States.)Throughout her campaign, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has argued that none of these connections would impede her judgment, that she would prosecute financial crime fearlessly. When asked in a debate earlier this month about potential conflict of interest, she said that she would recuse herself in any instance where she had ties to the accused. But that is a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. When you elect a gifted lawyer to run a hugely influential office, the hope is that she’ll be available, game in hand, to advise on the biggest and most sensational cases.The chief criticism of the Vance era is that his office kowtowed to the moneyed class over and over. It laid bare the danger that comes from intimacy with the opposition and revealed the high costs of recusal. A decade ago, for instance, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in a Midtown hotel, he retained the counsel of Marc Agnifilo. As it happened, the lawyer was married to someone high up in Mr. Vance’s office — the chief of the trial division, who ordinarily would have supervised the case.Given that Karen Friedman Agnifilo had a lot of experience in sex crimes, her involvement would have been invaluable. Instead she was forced to tuck herself away. Eventually the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn were dismissed under a case that famously collapsed. During the preceding 18 months, the Agnifilos had found themselves in similarly entangled situations two dozen times.In his acclaimed 2017 book, “The Chickenshit Club,” the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jesse Eisinger begins with the question of how it came to pass that virtually no one was prosecuted in regard to the 2008 financial crisis. He determines that a growing sense of coziness and collusion between the business and legal professions, emergent since the beginning of the current century, have limited both the ability and commitment of prosecutors to tackle corporations and the people who run them. Several years ago, Eric Holder, who has endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein (she worked for him in the Obama Justice Department), briefly embraced the idea that certain banks are “too big to jail.”Tahanie Aboushi, a civil rights lawyer who is essentially a dismantlist, sits at a very different end of the continuum. She is in favor of cutting the budget of the police department by 50 percent, and her antipathy to incarceration extends to a refusal to prosecute a long list of offenses, including harassment in the second degree, which, as Ms. Farhadian Weinstein astutely pointed out in the most recent debate, would include shoving a person on a subway platform out of bias.Even the Five Boro Defenders, a group of lawyers and social justice advocates deeply sympathetic to Ms. Aboushi’s worldview, pointed out in their voting guide that they found it “concerning” that “she frequently lacked a clear understanding or vision” for accomplishing her objectives. Some opposed to Ms. Aboushi’s approach resent her inclusion in a race that they worry could detract from the other leading progressive, Alvin Bragg, the only Black candidate in the field. Nonetheless, Ms. Aboushi has the support of the influential Working Families Party.A native of Harlem, the son of a math teacher and a father who worked in social welfare, Mr. Bragg has a long and impressive résumé, having served as a federal prosecutor under Preet Bharara (who has endorsed him) and in various top positions in the state attorney general’s office. There he oversaw an investigation into the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program and found that only one-tenth of 1 percent of stops, over a period of three years, resulted in convictions for a violent crime. He also worked to repeal 50-a, the law that shielded the misbehaviors of the police from the public for so long.“The thing about Alvin is that you don’t have to worry about his sincerity as a reformer,” Zephyr Teachout, the legal scholar who challenged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the left in the Democratic primary six years ago. “He has done the work.”Whoever becomes the next D.A. will inherit the case against the Trump Organization and all the major legacy potential that comes along with it. In the eyes of many New Yorkers, Manhattan’s next district attorney will either be the one to finally bring Donald Trump to account — or be remembered as the one who failed to do so. For the moment at least, there is no evidence that anyone running would need to back away from the challenge of that. More

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      Alvin Bragg for Manhattan D.A.: The Times Endorsement

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      There are few bigger jobs on the New York ballot this year than that of Manhattan district attorney. Cyrus Vance Jr., one of only two men who have held the office since 1975, isn’t seeking re-election. In a borough where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, the winner of the June 22 primary contest is very likely to cruise to victory in November, and there is a crowded field of talented lawyers who are vying to replace him.Whoever wins the job will face a rise in shootings, homicides and other violent crimes to thwart. While warmer days are bringing back block parties and crowded parks in other boroughs, much of Midtown is still eerily empty and dotted with vacant storefronts. And as the pandemic wanes in New York, right now there are few guarantees that the rhythms of normal life will return in a manner that ensures all its residents feel protected and served by the criminal justice system.Then, of course, there is the reality that the system was not serving many New Yorkers well long before coronavirus ever arrived in the city.Manhattan will need a distinctive kind of district attorney: one who knows how to use the levers of the office to drive down the current spike in violence while moving forward with the hard and overdue work of criminal justice reform. The best person for the job is Alvin Bragg.Mr. Bragg is a talented prosecutor with the endorsement of former colleagues across a wide swath of the legal system. He served as first chief deputy at the state attorney general’s office, where he oversaw some 1,200 people and successfully sued the Trump Foundation for illegally using campaign funds — experience that could be invaluable because the next Manhattan district attorney will be left with finishing Mr. Vance’s investigation into the former president’s business dealings.Mr. Bragg also served as a federal prosecutor under Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, prosecuting public corruption, wage theft and, at one point, a violent money-laundering scheme linked to the Sinaloa cartel of Mexico. Mr. Bharara has endorsed him.Mr. Bragg has worked closely with the police to prosecute complex gun cases and also sued officers over excessive force. He is currently representing Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, in a case against Mayor Bill de Blasio over her son’s 2014 death at the hands of police.The Manhattan district attorney’s office is home to some of the most talented prosecutors in the country and Mr. Bragg has demonstrated he understands what can be accomplished without going to some of the political extremes we’ve heard in this election. Finding common ground among prosecutors, police leadership and the public will be crucial.Even after reforms by Mr. Vance cut the office’s caseload by more than half, nearly 80 percent of the cases prosecuted there in 2019 were misdemeanors, according to data from the office. Mr. Bragg plans to restructure the office to stop using it to criminalize poverty and focus more intensely on prosecuting violent gun crimes, sexual assault cases and corruption. He wants to dissolve the current sex-crimes unit and build a modern unit that centers the experience of survivors. He has promised to expand programs that offer alternatives to incarceration and establish a robust police integrity unit that will report directly to him. He has the management experience to get these reforms done.Mr. Bragg grew up in Harlem and came of age during the crack cocaine epidemic. He would also be Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, a remarkable fact, considering the disproportionate toll that both criminal violence and overcriminalization have taken on Black New Yorkers. The trauma that gun violence continues to inflict on people living in poverty, even as the city remains largely safe, is personal for Mr. Bragg. He says he was just 10 years old when he first had a gun pointed at him — something he experienced several more times, at the hands of police officers and others, while walking through the neighborhood in which he lived.Today, Mr. Bragg is committed to reasonable reforms to improve both policing and prosecutions and will put the work in to see them through to a safer New York. That’s why he went home to Harlem after graduating from Harvard Law School, first as a civil rights attorney, then as a prosecutor.The city’s rise in gun violence may end with the pandemic, or it may not. Either way, Manhattan needs a leader dedicated to keeping the public safe without returning to the overly punitive practices deployed for so many years.Mr. Bragg brings the experience, the nimbleness and the moral compass Manhattan needs. He deserves your vote.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Police Accountability Is Personal for This Manhattan D.A. Candidate

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      Alvin Bragg has had encounters with the police both in the streets and in the courts. He wants to change the system from within.The first time Alvin Bragg began thinking about police accountability was not long after an officer put a gun to his head, when he was a 15-year-old in Harlem in the 1980s.Nearly 30 years later, as a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office in 2017, Mr. Bragg found himself confronting the same issue, overseeing the case against Officer Wayne Isaacs, who was off duty when he killed Delrawn Small in the early morning in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.The officer was charged with murder and manslaughter. Video of the shooting, prosecutors argued, appeared to contradict the officer’s account. The jury acquitted him anyway.“I felt dejected, demoralized, really upset for the family,” Mr. Bragg recalled. “I felt like our system had not worked.”Now, the issues of police accountability and public integrity that Mr. Bragg confronted as a prosecutor are at the center of his campaign to lead one of the most important district attorney’s offices in the country. Mr. Bragg, 47, a Democrat, is one of nine candidates vying for the office, and is among those seeking to balance concerns about public safety against a progressive push to make the criminal justice system less punitive.In seeking to position himself as the candidate most capable of changing the system from the inside, Mr. Bragg has leaned on his personal history — including both his street-corner and courtroom encounters with the police. And Mr. Bragg, who is the only Black candidate running, would be the first Black person to lead an office where, researchers have found, race continues to be a critical factor in nearly every part of the process.But his history leading the unit that tried Officer Isaacs — a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians — undermines a record that sounds better than it looks, his opponents and their supporters charge. Under Mr. Bragg, the unit, then called the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit, investigated 24 cases and brought back zero convictions. (It has not fared any better since he left, three years ago.)Officer Wayne Isaacs, center, was found not guilty after a 2017 trial; Mr. Bragg said the verdict still troubles him.  Dave Sanders for The New York Times“The Manhattan district attorney needs to be able to manage the most complicated and difficult cases, and that includes holding police accountable,” said Lucy Lang, another candidate in the race, who at a debate last week attacked Mr. Bragg’s record on police accountability. “Unfortunately, in the 24 cases of police killings that came before him, Alvin wasn’t able to hold a single officer accountable.”Mr. Bragg said that his record leading the unit, now called the Office of Special Investigation, showed only that the law makes it extremely difficult to successfully prosecute police officers.Experts agree. Though there are exceptions, including the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Mr. Bragg’s record with the unit at the attorney general’s office is not unusual. It remains extremely difficult to charge, let alone convict, police officers.Peter Neufeld, head of the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions, said that Mr. Bragg was fighting within a system that was heavily weighted against him. (Mr. Neufeld endorsed Mr. Bragg last month.)“It doesn’t make sense when looking at somebody who is taking on an adversary with both hands tied behind his back to measure his win-loss record,” he said.Close to homeMr. Bragg grew up on 139th Street in the heart of Harlem. Born in 1973, on the cusp of the city’s fiscal crisis, he said he learned at an early age which blocks were safe and which were not, the places he could go and the places that were best avoided.His mother, a math teacher, kept a close eye on him and made sure he focused on school, drilling him on his multiplication tables on the M10 bus and asking him to stay within the confines of their block. His father, who worked for the New York Urban League, regaled him with stories about the Willis Reed-era New York Knicks and encouraged him to get outside.There could be trouble, even close to home. When Mr. Bragg was 10 years old, he had a knife put to his neck by some teenagers in the middle of the day, in what he described as a “hazing,” but a very scary one.And then there were the police. About five years later, he was walking with a friend when an unmarked police car began driving the wrong way on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, he said. Three officers emerged from the car. One put a gun to Mr. Bragg’s head. They asked if he was dealing drugs and started going through his pockets.“You didn’t need to go to law school to know this was unlawful,” Mr. Bragg said. His interest in criminal justice started there.He went to Harvard and Harvard Law School and clerked for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he first began to see the way that prosecutors could work on behalf of public safety. After several years working as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, he became a prosecutor at the New York attorney general’s office, looking at public corruption and white- collar crime. He later worked under Preet Bharara, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District, as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, before returning to the attorney general’s office, where he focused on police misconduct.Mr. Bharara, who has endorsed Mr. Bragg, said that he had been set apart while a federal prosecutor by his concerns about police accountability and public corruption.“He’s not jumping on the bandwagon in connection with the race for office,” Mr. Bharara said. “He’s cared about these things for a long time.”Mr. Bragg, who met volunteers in Union Square this month, has sought to balance progressive ideas about the criminal justice system with public safety concerns.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesCivil Rights and Public SafetyMr. Bragg is one of nine candidates, eight Democrats and one Republican, running to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr. as the chief prosecutor in Manhattan, a position that carries immense power to affect the criminal justice system in New York City.He has said that his overall focus will be on decreasing the number of people behind bars, that he will create a new unit to investigate police misconduct, move resources toward prosecutors investigating economic crime and overhaul the sex crimes unit. He has proposed a plan that would work to stem the flow of guns into New York from out of state.Many of Mr. Bragg’s ideas reflect the move to the left in prosecutorial elections in cities around the country in recent years — a shift that has ushered in a new breed of progressive prosecutor.Initially the race in Manhattan seemed to follow that pattern, as the majority of the Democratic candidates promoted lenient approaches to certain low-level crimes.But in recent months, as gun violence has continued to rise in New York City and another leading Democratic candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has stressed the importance of prosecuting crime, tension has grown between those pushing for leniency and those emphasizing public safety. (As of January, Mr. Bragg had raised more money than anyone other than Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and on Saturday, a racial justice organization, Color of Change, said it would spend $1 million promoting his candidacy.)Mr. Bragg has found a synthesis, based on his biography, that he hopes will persuade voters.“People care about both,” he said. “They want civil rights and public safety. Being safe is your first civil right, and we can’t have safety without community trust, which is based on civil rights.”And so he relies on his record — even when his opponents say it is unflattering. Under pressure from Ms. Lang during last week’s debate, he called the unit that has garnered zero convictions “the most transformative, transparent unit in this space in the history of this country.”Mr. Bragg has argued that the way his office worked with the victims’ families marked the beginning of a productive alliance between prosecutors and protesters, both pushing for justice. The unit was created after Eric Garner’s death in police custody in 2014; Mr. Bragg has been endorsed by Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr.Mr. Small’s brother, Victor Dempsey, said that Mr. Bragg had consulted him throughout the case against Officer Isaacs. He has endorsed Mr. Bragg’s candidacy.“Alvin has been a tremendous part in my advocacy work and my family’s advocacy work because he kind of gave us the impetus to keep fighting,” he said.But not all of Mr. Small’s family has backed Mr. Bragg. Victoria Davis, his sister, has endorsed Ms. Lang, who worked as a prosecutor under Mr. Vance.In a recent conversation, Ms. Davis said that she did not feel Mr. Bragg had done everything he could for her brother, who she said was demonized during the officer’s trial because of a tattoo. “I think he wasn’t humanized,” she said of her brother.Mr. Bragg still dwells on the acquittal of Officer Isaacs. He agreed with Ms. Davis that the defense team had successfully dehumanized Mr. Small, transforming him into what Mr. Bragg called a “Black boogeyman,” a tactic that predated the modern criminal justice system.“The part that is sad is that it works,” he said. “That racial imagery is a tie that binds throughout our history. Ultimately that’s the original sin, and we’ve got to address that.” More

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      Wall Street Is Donating to Tali Farhadian Weinstein. Is That a Problem?

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      Tali Farhadian Weinstein built up a $2.2 million war chest with help from hedge fund managers, far more than her rivals in the Manhattan district attorney race. Even had she not raised more money than her rivals, Tali Farhadian Weinstein would be a formidable candidate in the nine-way race to become the Manhattan district attorney, perhaps the most high-profile local prosecutor’s office in the country.She was a Rhodes scholar, has an elite legal résumé and is the only candidate who has worked for both the Justice Department and a city prosecutor’s office. And while most of the candidates are campaigning as reformers intent on reducing incarceration, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, 45, has staked out a slightly more conservative position, expressing concerns about guns and gangs.But what most sets Ms. Farhadian Weinstein apart from the field is her fund-raising. As of January, she had raised $2.2 million, far more than her competitors, hundreds of thousands of it from Wall Street, where her husband is a major hedge fund manager.Her opponents, legal ethicists and good government advocates have raised questions about that support, pointing out that the Manhattan district attorney, by virtue of geography, has jurisdiction over a large number of financial crimes.“It’s very difficult to see how a Manhattan D.A. candidate can accept really large and numerous donations from people who are involved in industries who could easily be the subject of that office’s attention,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who is married to the wealthy hedge fund manager Boaz Weinstein, says the donations will not influence her judgment on prosecuting cases. She notes she has not received large sums from criminal defense attorneys.“Judge me on my record,” she said. “I’ve gotten every job I’ve ever had on my own and I’ve never done a favor for anyone.”Much of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s campaign war chest came from a small group of donors in the hedge fund industry. The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management, William A. Ackman, and his wife have contributed $70,000 to her. Kenneth Griffin, who founded Citadel, gave Ms. Farhadian Weinstein $10,000, and his colleague Pablo Salame, the head of global credit at Citadel, donated $35,000.She also received $70,800 from the founder of PointState Capital, Zach Schreiber, and his wife, as well as $55,000 from Michael Novogratz, formerly of the Fortress Investment Group, and his wife.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, left, speaking to voters Friday on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Opponents and good government advocates have raised questions about her donors.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe flood of money from financiers into Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s coffers has been reported by other news outlets, most recently Gothamist. It gives her a significant advantage in the race, which is likely to be decided by a narrow margin during the Democratic primary in June.She has plastered Upper Manhattan with expensive mailers and has hosted high-profile guests on a podcast to promote her candidacy, including the author Malcolm Gladwell and two U.S. senators — Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.The heavy support from New York’s ultrawealthy in finance has surprised longtime campaign consultants watching the race, including some working on behalf of her opponents.George Arzt, a onetime adviser and campaign spokesman for Robert M. Morgenthau, who was Manhattan district attorney for decades, said he had “never seen such eye-popping numbers for individual donations in a D.A.’s race.” Mr. Arzt is currently working with another candidate, Liz Crotty. “Whatever happened to the sheriff of Wall Street?” he added.‘She was not a shrinking violet’Ms. Farhadian Weinstein came to the United States in 1979 as a 4-year-old, the daughter of Jewish parents from Iran who fled the revolution and applied for asylum.The uncertainty she felt as a young person, knowing the government could change her life at any moment, affected her career path, she said. “I think now there was always an impulse to be on the other side and to be a decision maker,” she said.After graduating from Yale Law, she was offered clerkships with Merrick B. Garland, who was then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. At the U.S. Department of Justice, she worked as a counsel under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who remembers her as a fierce debater.“She had really good judgment and the guts to challenge people at the Justice Department,” said Mr. Holder, who has endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein. “She was not a shrinking violet.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s courage was tested when, as a federal prosecutor pregnant with her third child, a defendant charged with murder threatened to hire someone to kidnap her and cause her to lose the pregnancy.For weeks, federal marshals had to escort her. She was told she could come off the case, if it would make her more comfortable, but she stayed on until the baby was born.Later, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein served for several years as the general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, one of the most progressive local prosecutors in the country.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein with the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, in 2019. She is the only candidate who has worked for both the Justice Department and a city prosecutor’s office.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesStill, she has tacked to the right of her competitors in the race for Manhattan district attorney. She has been less prone than several of her rivals, for instance, to pledge that she would not prosecute certain categories of low-level crime.“It’s very easy and simplistic to insist on bright-line rules,” she said. “The hard work of prosecutorial discretion is having policies but also allowing for discretion to do justice in individual cases.”The possibility of conflictsThe Manhattan district attorney’s office has long overseen many investigations into wrongdoing in the worlds of finance, real estate and other lucrative industries based in the borough. Mr. Morgenthau, the predecessor of the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was known for taking a particularly tough line against white-collar crime.Under Mr. Vance, the office’s reputation for taking on the powerful lessened, in part because of criticism he drew over donations from lawyers for Harvey Weinstein and former President Donald J. Trump, who were under investigation. Mr. Vance eventually decided to stop accepting donations from lawyers with pending cases.For her part, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has declined to accept donations of more than $1 from defense lawyers, firms with a defense law practice or lawyers who work at firms with a defense law practice, saying that donations from lawyers who appeared before the district attorney’s office created the most potential for conflicts of interest. She brushed off the suggestion the donations from people in finance might create such conflicts if she were to win.“Anybody is a would-be witness or target or a subject of an investigation,” she said. “That’s diffuse.”Some of her opponents disagree. “By running a campaign that’s so tied to Wall Street, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has put herself at a real political and frankly ethical disadvantage,” said Jamarah Hayner, the campaign manager for Tahanie Aboushi, who is running on a platform to shrink the size and power of the district attorney’s office.Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an expert in legal ethics, said in an interview that while Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had violated no ethics rule, she should not have accepted the donations.“The fact that this is the Manhattan D.A. and Manhattan is the financial capital of the country if not the world says to me that this candidate should not be raising large sums from hedge fund interests,” he said.All told, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has received at least 21 donations of $30,000 or more. (The maximum allowable is about $38,000.) Her opponent Alvin Bragg, who was the runner-up in the money race in January, when candidates last filed disclosures, had received only two donations of that size. Ms. Aboushi had received only one similarly hefty donation, from the professional basketball player Kyrie Irving.Leaders at her husband’s fund, Saba Capital, have collectively given Ms. Farhadian Weinstein more than $105,000.In 2020, Mr. Weinstein gave the maximum allowable donations to Ritchie Torres and Adriano Espaillat, two congressmen who have endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has also donated thousands of dollars in past years to Senators Booker and Gillibrand, who appeared on Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s podcast, “Hearing.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein bristles at questions about her husband’s influence on her, calling them “deeply disappointing and sexist.” To answer critics, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein asked Judge Jonathan Lippman, the former chief judge of New York State, to advise her on what conflicts might arise because of her husband’s business. (Broadly speaking, Mr. Weinstein trades highly complex financial instruments.)Judge Lippman said in an interview he did not anticipate Mr. Weinstein’s business would create conflicts of interest, but he laid out steps she could take to ensure any potential investigation would remain independent. He did not look closely at Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s fund-raising, but said he did not find it unusual or concerning. “It goes with the terrain of running for public office,” he said.Zephyr Teachout, a lawyer and former candidate for governor who has worked extensively on public corruption matters, said the Wall Street money Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had amassed “raises all kinds of red flags.”“It’s really problematic and distorting to have so much Wall Street cash in this race because the D.A. is responsible for enforcing white-collar criminal law in Manhattan,” she said. “We are talking about an enormous amount of money that common sense tells you has the power to shape judgment.” More