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    Fani Willis Took On Atlanta’s Gangs. Now She May Be Coming For Trump.

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Late on the first Sunday of 2021, news broke of President Donald J. Trump’s call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to help contest the 2020 election. The next morning — Monday, Jan. 4 — was Fani Willis’s first day in the office as the district attorney for Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, as well as suburbs like Sandy Springs, East Point and Alpharetta. “Not the second day,” she told me when I met with her in November. “My very first day in this office — in that conference room, it’s all over the TV.” She found herself hoping that the secretary of state might have been “in another county when it happened,” she said, laughing darkly. He was not. And so, Willis said, “I’m stuck with it.”Outside Atlanta, Willis is now best known for this singular potential criminal target. Trump’s efforts to interfere in the outcome of the election in Georgia, in both phone calls to local officials and, potentially, as part of a scheme to organize alternate electors, have been under investigation by Willis’s office since February 2021. The Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone have testified before a special grand jury; so have former Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Raffensperger himself. In January, the special grand jury completed its investigatory work, submitting a report to Willis’s office and to a Superior Court judge, based on which Willis may or may not send evidence to a regular grand jury to seek criminal charges against Trump or his allies. If she does, there is every indication that she might bring one of her favorite prosecutorial tools to bear: racketeering charges, as laid out in the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, more famously used to prosecute the Mafia and criminal street gangs.Trump has attacked Willis on his Truth Social platform as a “young, ambitious, Radical Left Democrat ‘Prosecutor’ from Georgia, who is presiding over one of the most Crime Ridden and Corrupt places in the USA.” For a national audience not paying close attention to Atlanta politics, this claim might not sound fantastical. Willis, 51, is a Democrat and the first Black woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney — the first woman, period — and her victory in 2020 came amid a wave of reform-minded progressive prosecutors’ winning seats: George Gascón in Los Angeles, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.Willis (center) with her team in 2022 during proceedings to seat a special-purpose grand jury in Fulton County to look into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.Ben Gray/Associated PressBut it was evident from the outset that Willis would represent something quite different. In July 2021, six months into her tenure, she appeared before the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, which holds bimonthly public meetings in an assembly hall in downtown Atlanta, to request additional personnel. By the time she spoke, the session had already stretched over eight hours, including several public comments questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. She was joined by Fulton County’s Sheriff Patrick Labat, who wore a tactical vest that made him look as if he’d arrived straight from a hostage situation. Willis had dressed more business casual — a black V-neck blouse with bell sleeves, her hair braided and pulled back — but it immediately became clear who would be taking charge.“We have a public-safety crisis going on,” Willis began, coolly scanning her audience. Crime was rising, she said. Because of court backlogs and mismanagement by her predecessor, she argued, more dangerous individuals would end up on the streets unless she could hire more staff. Crime, she warned the commissioners, would be the primary issue in upcoming local elections. “None of your constituents is safe,” she thundered, sounding like a prosecutor facing another jury. “Not yours, Mr. Pitts — Chairman Pitts. Not yours, Commissioner Hall. Not yours, Commissioner Ellis.”Her slides piled up dire statistics: rapes up 86 percent from the previous summer, murders up 25 percent, more than 1,400 unindicted suspects who could soon be bonded out of jail. “So maybe you’re thinking, Well, this ain’t really my issue, not in my district,” she said. “But no! The murders are occurring eve-ry-where.” Photographs of victims flashed on the screen. A woman killed in April in District 1. “This young lady, she was in her 70s. My mama would say that’s young. Her tenant bludgeoned her to death.” A man killed in District 3. “He’s a high exec at U.P.S. After a hard workweek, he went to have a drink. I think that’s his right. He walked up and became a victim to gang violence. He’s dead. I’m the one who talks to his mama. Next slide.” A little girl in District 3. “Her and her mama and auntie shopping at Christmas. Anyone here don’t go to the mall around Christmas? How about dead?” A Tony Award-nominated actor in District 4. “Gets in a verbal dispute, is followed home and shot in the back multiple times. Your district.”And so it went, a virtuoso performance that had Sheriff Labat praising her, before his own remarks, as “the baddest D.A. in the country” and the commissioners offering full-throated, even profane support for her efforts. “[Expletive] the lowest millage rate!” shouted Marvin Arrington Jr., District 5’s commissioner, referring to the local tax burden. “We got to get these people locked up!” That September, the commission voted to appropriate an additional $5 million for Willis’s office.Willis has described a number of her initiatives as D.A. as progressive, including a pretrial diversion program in which individuals accused of certain crimes can avoid being indicted by agreeing to restitution and community service. But her overriding focus has been public safety, and on that front she has been an unapologetic doomsayer, employing rhetoric on violence and gang activity that can leave her sounding, at times, as if she shares Trump’s dim assessment of local crime levels. Gangs, Willis claimed at a news conference last May, “are committing, conservatively, 75 to 80 percent of all the violent crime that we are seeing within our community. And so they have to be rooted out of our community.”To that end, she quickly moved to expand her office’s gang unit. She has also pushed the Atlanta Police Department to seek more gang warrants and personally lobbied for the Safe and Secure Georgia Act, an attempt to make the state’s already-tough gang laws even tougher, imposing mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders and increasing the power of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Willis suggested the name for the bill, which died in the statehouse; when a reporter from the Atlanta NBC affiliate pointed out during an interview that all 25 of its initial sponsors were Republicans, Willis responded that she was “happy to work with anyone who wants to help me in this fight against gang violence and crime.”The election special grand jury inquiry is far from the only case helmed by Willis to make national news — or to open her up to criticism. In 2014, she was lead prosecutor on an infamous RICO case involving 35 teachers, principals and other educators in the Atlanta public-school system, who were accused of changing students’ answers on standardized tests for financial gain, a prosecution many observers found excessive. And since she took office, her crackdown on gangs has brought her in direct conflict with one of Atlanta’s biggest cultural exports, hip-hop music, in another series of cases that have drawn fire for potential overreach. There was a sweeping 105-count RICO indictment against 12 supposed members of various sets of the Bloods, including the Billboard-charting rapper YFN Lucci; later came gang charges and an indictment under RICO against the acclaimed artist Young Thug and 27 supposed associates (including another wildly popular rapper, Gunna), with members of the group accused of involvement in murder, armed robbery, drug dealing and witness intimidation. At a news conference in August, Willis announced the indictment of 26 supposed members of the Drug Rich gang, who were accused of attempted murder, armed robbery and a series of home invasions and burglaries targeting celebrities including Mariah Carey and the N.F.L. wide receiver Calvin Ridley. “We have a message,” she told the assembled reporters: “Get out of this county or expect to start seeing sentences that go life-plus, because I am not going to negotiate with gang members.”‘We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them.’When I visited her office late last year, Willis sat behind a large desk and indicated that I should take a seat on a couch about 10 feet away. Jeff DiSantis, her media-relations chief, sat in a corner, wearing cowboy boots and rarely glancing up from his laptop. Gov. Brian Kemp had just testified before the special grand jury that morning; if not for the rain, he might have walked over from his office in the Capitol building, only blocks away. Everyone I spoke with in Willis’s office referred to her as Madam D.A., and she faced me with her arms crossed and an apprising formality, the sort of person more used to asking the questions than answering them.This steely reputation has cheered those who dream of seeing the Teflon ex-president in criminal peril. Willis has declined to discuss that investigation outside of opaque, highly disciplined statements, leaving observers searching for clues. Might she work her way up the chain, as RICO prosecutors often do, to Trump himself? Will a brazen violation of state election law turn out to be his biggest legal vulnerability? Is Willis prepared for a national partisan fight on a scale she has never experienced? “The reality is, we have a job, and the job is just to try to find the truth,” she told me, adopting the deliberate tone of a professional sharing reasonable but otherwise unexciting information. As for Trump: “We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them. And if it turns out that charges are not warranted, we’re not going to bring them. We’re just going through the process.”A better way to understand how Willis operates might be to consider how she reached this position in the first place. Willis came to the district attorney’s office by navigating a very particular set of political dynamics, and by doing so at a very specific moment in the history of Atlanta, the birthplace of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and so-called Black Mecca — a moment marked by debates about crime and policing, along with roiling local protests that shaped perceptions of public order. How the politics surrounding all of these issues will play out remains an open question. But it’s one that Willis, a Black woman who ran with the endorsement of a police union, is positioned to test like few others. “I’m probably not a very good politician,” she told me. “But I’m a very good prosecutor.”Willis was born in Inglewood, Calif., just outside Los Angeles, in 1971. Her father, John C. Floyd III, was a founder of the Black Panther Political Party in Los Angeles, of which Angela Davis was briefly a member. He eventually became a criminal defense attorney, having noticed over the course of many protest arrests that the lawyers who showed up to spring him and his comrades from jail were always white. The family moved to Washington as Willis entered first grade. Her parents split up a few years later, and her mother eventually returned to California. Willis mostly stayed with her father, whose caseload — in 1980s Washington, at the height of the crack epidemic — was “murders and dope boys,” she told me. When she was a teenager, he would issue dire warnings: You can’t go there. My client killed somebody over there. “I tease him sometimes now that it was child abuse, because at 8, I was putting his criminal files together,” Willis said.From around that age, Willis knew she wanted to follow her father’s path. After graduating from Howard University, she moved to Atlanta to attend law school at Emory. Her first job was in the office of a defense lawyer named Alvin Kendall, working alongside another young Atlanta lawyer, the future Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. The volume and variety of cases — she arrived at one bond hearing only to recognize her client as the stripper from her bachelorette party — gave her confidence in the courtroom, and she eventually left to start her own practice. Not long after, “Alvin got into some trouble,” as Willis put it; in 1998, Kendall was disbarred and sentenced to prison for five years for conspiring to give a client advance warning of a criminal search. (He was reinstated in 2015.)In 2001, Willis joined the Fulton County district attorney’s office. The D.A. at the time was Paul Howard, who had gone from picking cotton and attending a segregated high school outside Augusta to becoming, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the first African American district attorney in the entire state of Georgia. Willis describes him as a brilliant man: “I wanted to please him, so I worked really hard here,” she said. In the major-crimes unit, she tried over 100 murder cases, averaging a dozen per year. Eventually she became one of Howard’s chief deputies. “She was the superstar,” Antonio Lewis, an Atlanta City Council member, told me. “If you play basketball, LeBron James is better than everybody else, right? I’m telling you, people that worked with her in the office say: ‘Oh, that’s LeBron James. She’s better than us.’”Willis’s first encounter with national headlines came in 2014, with what became known as the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Most of the educators involved took plea deals, but prosecutors tried the final dozen on RICO conspiracy charges, winning racketeering convictions against 11. Critics found the prosecution excessive: the use of RICO, the eight-month trial, the prison sentences for some defendants. Questions were also raised about the decision to prosecute ordinary teachers for falsifying scores, rather than address systemic pressures or an overreliance on standardized tests. Willis remains unapologetic about the convictions. The prosecution “is not popular, meaning we don’t want to talk about it, but it absolutely needed to be done,” she says. “The reality is, if what they say in my obituary about me is ‘she stood up for Black children,’ then I’ll live with that.”Fani Willis speaking during a 2013 Fulton County Superior Court hearing related to the so-called Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.David Tulis/Associated PressDespite Republican candidates’ relentless use of crime as a wedge issue in 2022, criminal-justice reform was actually a rare area of bipartisan consensus for much of Willis’s time working under Howard. This was thanks in part to former Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican elected in 2010 who previously worked as an assistant district attorney and served as a judge. He made his case for cutting the state’s soaring prison population in both fiscal and moral terms; across his eight years as governor, there was bipartisan support for reforms addressing sentencing, juvenile justice and cash bail. Under Deal, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, prison admissions of Black inmates dropped to historic lows, prison spending fell and programs treating nonviolent offenders expanded. Tiffany Roberts, the public-policy director of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, told me that during those years national think tanks began “to look to Georgia for some direction”; the organization found itself working alongside not only liberal activists but also Newt Gingrich and the Koch brothers.Willis’s first run for an elected position came in 2018, around the close of Deal’s second term. By this point a divorced mother of two college-age daughters, Willis left the D.A.’s office and took $50,000 from her retirement fund to enter a race for Fulton County Superior Court judge, making it as far as the runoff election. Judge races in Georgia are nonpartisan, but she knew a number of voters would be Republicans, so she went to talk with a white Republican strategist on the north side of town. “I needed to be able to speak to that population, and I’m their perfect candidate, right?” she told me. “We’re conservative, we’re hard on crime, I’m a life prosecutor. And he told me something that was so hurtful.” She would never win those voters, the strategist said bluntly, because she was Black and female. “Your recording can’t pick up the way my face is, but I was like, ‘He don’t know what he’s talking about,’” Willis said. “That’s not the way people in my county think.” Still, that conversation, and her eventual loss, left her devastated. She remembers praying for guidance and sitting in her living room “feeling very lost.”One figure who was elected that year was Gov. Brian Kemp, who won a second term last November. He has a very different approach to crime than his predecessor, including pledges to build more prisons, increase mandatory minimum sentences for gang recruitment and tighten bail restrictions. In a campaign ad last year, Kemp accused his opponent, Stacey Abrams, of “lining her pockets with cash from defund-the-police extremists.” By the 2020 election, Tiffany Roberts says, it was “almost like a scarlet letter to take on criminal legal reform in Georgia” — a “narrative change” that has “painted anyone interested in changing these systems as a radical.”After her 2018 loss, Willis was appointed chief judge by the mayor of South Fulton, a separate city within Fulton County. She found the work boring — ruling on low-level misdemeanors in Municipal Court — but began making more money than ever before in her private practice. “I’m now representing a few athletes, they keep making babies, I’m doing family-law stuff with them,” she said. (She also represented at least one person connected with figures she would later target in a high-profile gang indictment — YSL Mondo, a Young Thug associate who, in a recent Rolling Stone interview, sounded surprised to see his former advocate prosecuting the group.) Life was good. “And then,” she went on, “Paul starts getting in trouble.”Paul Howard had been district attorney for 23 years. He was preparing to run for a seventh term when claims of misconduct began to surface. A former Fulton County human-resources administrator accused him of sexual harassment in late 2019. In February 2020, his former deputy chief of staff filed a lawsuit accusing Howard of discriminating against her after learning of her pregnancy. Howard denied both allegations, but members of the Atlanta political and legal class could see blood in the water. People began reaching out to Willis, saying she was the only person who could beat Howard and warning about a Republican governor appointing his replacement if the scandals ultimately took him down.She also heard from Mary Norwood, an independent who has run for mayor twice, served as a City Council member and lives in the wealthy, largely white Buckhead neighborhood. In the early 1990s, Norwood started one of the first robocall businesses, and she prides herself on knowing “the power of a short, simple message,” she says. One simple issue she had long been hammering was crime, despite her hailing from one of the lowest-crime districts in Atlanta. By early 2020, she had decided she wanted a new district-attorney candidate. Contrary to the meeting with the Republican strategist from two years earlier, Norwood left her meeting with Willis, a Black Democrat with a strong message on gang violence, a convert. Norwood raised funds for Willis’s campaign — “not real money, but early money,” she says — and urged her mostly Republican donors to choose a Democratic ballot in the primary and “help keep Buckhead safe” by voting in the D.A. race.Willis “absolutely” felt that she would be betraying Howard by running, she told me. But soon after the primary began, another woman came forward to accuse Howard of sexual harassment, and news broke that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was looking into claims that Howard had improperly funneled city grant money to a nonprofit he was running. (Howard denied criminal wrongdoing, though he paid a fine to the Georgia State Ethics Commission; he declined to comment for this article. Two of the misconduct suits were dismissed, and one remains pending.) Willis came in first in the primary — with, according to Norwood, significant support from her Buckhead community. But a third candidate, another former attorney in the D.A.’s office, was running to the left of both Willis and Howard, preventing her from winning more than 50 percent of the vote. A runoff election was scheduled for that August.The race unfolded in the summer of 2020, amid one of the most volatile environments in recent history. A pandemic raged, a presidential election loomed and national protests erupted — spinning, in Atlanta and other cities, in directions that would deeply complicate people’s feelings about law enforcement and public safety. On the night of June 12, just three days after Willis’s strong showing in the first round of voting, two white police officers arrived at a Wendy’s just south of downtown, where a 27-year-old Black man named Rayshard Brooks had fallen asleep in his car while idling at the drive-through. Brooks admitted to having been drinking, and his encounter with the officers proceeded for 40 minutes in a “cordial and uneventful” fashion, per a report later issued by special prosecutors. Only when an officer attempted to handcuff Brooks did things turn: Brooks wriggled away, grabbed and repeatedly fired an officer’s Taser and tried to flee. When Officer Garrett Rolfe pursued on foot, Brooks turned and tried to fire the Taser again. Rolfe fired three shots, striking Brooks twice in the back and left buttock and killing him.This was less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In Atlanta, downtown’s Centennial Olympic Park had already become a hub of Floyd protests, which Kim Jackson, an Episcopal priest and activist who had been serving as a protest chaplain since the 2014 demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., described to me as among the most diverse she had ever witnessed in the city — old, young and “just an extraordinary amount of white people showing up.” The power of such numbers, she said, left her feeling hopeful, as if “maybe something’s going to happen.”New footage of a white officer’s fatally shooting a Black suspect in the back only a few miles away was not the something Jackson had in mind. The day after Brooks’s killing, Rolfe was fired (though he would later be reinstated), Chief of Police Erika Shields resigned and the protests moved to the Wendy’s parking lot.Antonio Lewis, now a City Council member, was running for his seat at the time; he went straight to the Wendy’s site as soon as he heard there was a shooting, unaware that the victim was somebody he grew up with. (“We actually called Rayshard Little Mac,” he told me. “Nobody where I’m from called him Rayshard.”) The mood there was initially positive, according to Jackson, the priest and activist. But when evening came she detected a shift. Families took their children home. New people arrived. Water bottles were thrown. Police officers deployed smoke canisters. That night, people set fire to the Wendy’s.Willis campaigned for the office of district attorney in 2020, amid roiling protests in Atlanta over the killing of Rayshard Brooks by a police officer.Ben Gray/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressWithin days, Howard’s office announced indictments of both police officers involved in the shooting. To Norwood, the city councilwoman from Buckhead, the indictments were motivated by Howard’s poor showing in the first round of voting: “He was looking for, ‘I’m the tough guy, and I’m going to indict the police.’ So that’s why he did it. He did it as a campaign stunt.” Willis said she was “deeply concerned” that her opponent had moved faster than the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and urged “the community and the media to keep in mind the many cases involving police use of force that Mr. Howard has lacked the courage to act upon.” Howard’s action drew stronger denunciations from other quarters: The head of a Georgia police organization said the D.A. had “just successfully set up the city for another riot,” while the Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that Howard had cravenly decided to “bow immediately to the mob’s demands.”Willis accused Howard of tainting any potential prosecution by using footage of the Brooks shooting in a campaign ad and predicted that he would be arrested because of his financial impropriety before the end of the year. Howard, in a debate, hammered Willis for receiving an endorsement and campaign contributions from a police union and pointed out that, as she had happily spent most of her career working for him, voters might reasonably wonder, “If this guy was so bad, why did you stay with him for 16 years?” (When I asked Willis if she had been aware of any inappropriate behavior by Howard, she said curtly, “I knew there were issues.”)The site of the burned restaurant, which had held both a demonstration and a memorial, morphed into occupied territory. Parked cars and debris obstructed University Avenue in both directions. A block-party vibe continued by day: On June 19, people served barbecue from a smoker and families ate with their children in front of the charred Wendy’s, its freckled mascot smiling down from the still-standing sign. By evening, though, a young Black man marched down the street carrying a long gun, followed by another man in camouflage pants and a black SECURITY T-shirt; moments later, a 24-year-old protester was shot in the leg. The following day, a man was wounded in a drive-by shooting, and George Chidi, an independent journalist, was beaten up by armed vigilantes. Bill Torpy, a columnist at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, visited the site the next afternoon and was told by men with guns not to make any sudden moves or he would be shot. The barricades had become an armed checkpoint. Torpy witnessed two police cars approach, then drive away. Lewis, the city councilman, contends that some of the armed people were trying, in however misguided a way, to protect the space. “But what happened was they did it totally wrong. The city of Atlanta should have stepped in.”Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta’s mayor and Willis’s former colleague, would later acknowledge in an interview with The Journal-Constitution’s editorial board that she had held off on sending police officers to clear the area at the behest of Joyce Sheperd, the City Council member representing the district, whom Lewis was running to replace. Sheperd wanted more time to negotiate with the demonstrators. But there was also another reason for the lack of police presence: In the days following Howard’s decision to indict, 171 Atlanta police officers out of a force of 2,000 called in sick, in what local news outlets began calling a “blue flu.”On June 23, Brooks’s funeral was held at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached; Ebenezer’s pastor, the future Senator Raphael Warnock, presided. The progressive third-place finisher in the district-attorney primary, Christian Wise Smith, would soon publicly endorse Howard, praising his former boss for embracing “the movement of the people for a more progressive and restorative justice system.”On the evening of July 4, a man named Omar Ivery approached a roadblock near University in a Jeep Cherokee owned by his friend Charmaine Turner, who rode in the passenger seat. Her 8-year-old daughter, Secoriea, was in the back. When Ivery tried to drive past the barricade, a group of armed individuals opened fire on the Jeep, striking and killing the child.The Fourth of July was a Saturday. By Monday morning, the police had peacefully cleared the site of barricades, protesters and even the Brooks memorial. At a news conference, Mayor Bottoms noted that “Paul Howard made the decision to charge the officers. Paul Howard did not consult with me. He made that decision, and people can go to the polls and express how they feel about that decision in a few weeks.”Willis had already won the most votes in the first round of the primary, but now momentum was swinging overwhelmingly in her direction. She won the Aug. 11 runoff in a landslide, with over 70 percent of the vote. No Republican was running for D.A. in Fulton County, so winning the primary sealed the general election for Willis. Six months later, she would be opening her investigation of Trump.Shortly after her election, Willis sent a letter to local law-enforcement agencies indicating that her office would be prioritizing gangs. Citing one of her new recruits — Mike Carlson, a Republican who was instrumental in the development of the state’s gang laws and is now executive district attorney for major crimes — the letter asked the police to “bring us cases under the street-gang act so we can prosecute them.” Willis told me that her approach to gangs has been a “completely different one” from her predecessor’s, “just the way I’ve manned it up, meaning put the resources in there.” She added staff and technology and trained the Atlanta Police Department on identifying gang signifiers and writing gang warrants, resulting in what she says is a 300 percent increase in the department’s gang warrants.Willis’s office would employ the Georgia gang statute in August 2021, when a grand jury indicted Julian Conley and Jerrion McKinney for their roles in the death of Secoriea Turner. (Both have pleaded not guilty.) The D.A.’s office claimed that Conley and McKinney were Bloods who had come out to support Brooks, a fellow Blood. Brooks was on probation for domestic violence and theft offenses, but his family has denied any knowledge of gang membership. According to Gerald Griggs, the president of the Georgia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the power structure in Atlanta seized on Turner’s killing as an opportunity to change the narrative: “You know, ‘These were gang members out here, they were supporting Rayshard, Rayshard was a gang member, we got to do something about the gangs.’ And from all accounts of the people that I’ve spoken to who knew Rayshard Brooks, there was no indication that he was a gang member.”As for Brooks, Willis requested to have herself recused from the case, and she eventually was. A final report issued by special prosecutors found that the officers reacted in an “objectively reasonable manner” by using deadly force because Brooks “posed an immediate threat of physical violence” — though Brooks was 18 feet away, running in the opposite direction and holding an unloaded Taser. Willis told me it would be inappropriate for her to comment on that decision and would say only that, in her view, Howard’s handling of the indictment had been “unfair to the gentleman who lost his life, and certainly his family, and it was unfair to the police, because they do also have a right to due process.”Sidestepping a politically messy decision on whether or not to prosecute police officers has allowed Willis to keep her focus primarily on gangs. But the size of the net Georgia’s street-gang statute hands prosecutors, and Willis’s frequent use of it, have raised concerns for critics. Carlson describes Georgia’s gang laws as “in many ways the most powerful” in the country because of provisions making earlier criminal activities as a gang member “presumptively admissible” in court. (In most criminal trials, bringing up past actions to demonstrate criminal propensity is forbidden.) Devin Franklin, who joined the Southern Center for Human Rights last March, spent the 12 previous years as a lawyer in the public defenders’ office, where, he told me, he noticed a pattern: Lower-level crimes were elevated because they were supposedly committed by a person affiliated with a gang. An individual crime like gun possession could be enhanced by gang charges on the logic that the offender was lending “credibility” to a larger criminal organization. Or, sometimes, the state would bring a case in which “a neutral body would say the evidence is fairly weak,” Franklin said, but attaching a gang charge allowed prosecutors to shift focus toward the “general violence of the gang,” forcing the accused to defend themselves “against this narrative of, ‘I’m a violent person, because I hang with quote-unquote “thugs.” ’”Willis’s approach to high-profile gang prosecutions offers a window into how she might proceed with a target like Trump. In particular, there is her unsparing deployment of RICO indictments, even as critics question their breadth. Last year’s 56-count indictment of Young Thug’s YSL group, for example — the name signifying both a record label and, per Willis’s office, an associated criminal organization — included charges of murder and armed robbery but also cited social-media posts, minor offenses like dealing marijuana and, in what has drawn the most pushback, song lyrics as examples of furthering the conspiracy. Carlson, who comes from a family of bluegrass musicians, says he is comfortable with citing lyrics in these circumstances: “Lyrics of skinhead and other white-supremacist groups have been used for decades in racketeering and gang-related prosecutions for hate crimes. Is somebody suggesting we should stop that?” At a news conference, Willis defended the practice, quoting lyrics by a Drug Rich member including “we’ll kick in the house” and “if we steal a car, we’re gonna take off the tags.” “I have some legal advice,” she said. “Don’t confess to crimes on rap lyrics if you do not want them used. Or at least get out of my county.”The rapper Young Thug during a virtual appearance before a Fulton County magistrate judge in Atlanta in 2022.Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressJury selection for the YSL case began, chaotically, in January. Young Thug was caught apparently accepting a Percocet from one of his co-defendants in the courtroom. Eight of the 28 men named in the indictment, including Gunna, have accepted plea deals; the judge estimates that the trial of the others could last between six and nine months, with Willis’s office already promising as many as 300 possible witnesses. Such a length would approach that of the longest criminal trial in Georgia’s history: the 2014 RICO trial of the educators accused in the standardized-test-cheating scheme, for which Willis served as lead prosecutor.Shani Robinson, one of the convicted teachers, co-wrote a 2019 book about her experience, “None of the Above.” She is not a fan of Willis, to put it mildly; the book describes her as “holding forth like a fire-and-brimstone preacher.” (Also, “having a penchant for dull blazers.”) Robinson’s account of Willis’s opening argument, during which she explained to jurors how RICO worked, gets at the tension between what Willis and her office see as critical tools and what critics consider overreach: “ ‘The act of one conspirator is the act of all,’ she gravely stated. She added that people don’t have to meet in person or agree on anything to be conspirators. ‘But what you do have to do is all be doing the same thing for the same purpose.’”Robinson was a first-grade teacher whose students’ standardized tests were considered practice. They did not count academically or apply toward any district targets, Robinson says, adding that she never received any kind of bonus pay. She has always insisted upon her innocence and refused to take a plea deal, despite the threat of up to 25 years in prison and a RICO prosecution that, she said, placed pressure on defendants to plead guilty and testify against others. When we met at a Starbucks in Atlanta, nine years after the original trial, her case was still making its way through the appeal process.“This is what I’ve come across, especially dealing with the media, especially dealing with the liberal media: Fani is a Black woman, a Democrat, who is going after Trump, and people just want to turn a blind eye,” she told me. “And I’m like, She’s a Black woman who is trying to send other Black women who have children to prison! She asked the judge to give me prison time even though I had a 4-month-old baby at home.” The N.A.A.C.P.’s Griggs, a criminal defense attorney who represented another of the teachers at the original trial, told me he considered the prosecution “a colossal waste of taxpayer money. I don’t think a single child benefited from the trial. I think that teachers who had nothing to do with the actual cheating that happened in Atlanta public schools were punished for things that happened at the top.”Willis remains proud of her work on a trial that was so record-shatteringly long and complicated. She left the D.A.’s office to run for judge in part, she told me, because she found herself thinking, “What case is ever going to be bigger than that?”Now she could be facing a much bigger case: the potential prosecution of a former president. Considering the known facts and Willis’s demonstrated skill at presenting juries with sprawling conspiracy cases, a lengthy RICO trial is a distinct possibility. But it’s an approach she would be choosing in the highest-pressure context imaginable — one that would require both a huge investment of her office’s resources and a political appetite for a good deal of backlash and spectacle.If Willis has ambitions beyond the office of the Fulton County district attorney, she hasn’t spoken publicly about them. From a political standpoint, her only real misstep thus far has been hosting a fund-raiser last summer for Charlie Bailey, a former colleague at the D.A.’s office who was running for lieutenant governor. Bailey’s Republican opponent, Burt Jones, was one of 16 fake Trump electors Willis’s office was investigating, and the fund-raiser drew a sharp rebuke from Judge Robert McBurney of the Fulton County Superior Court — the same judge tasked with deciding whether to make public the special grand jury’s report — who called it a “what are you thinking” moment that created “horrific” optics and disqualified Willis from proceeding with her investigation of Jones.There was a scenario in which a Democrat like Willis, with her tough-as-nails messaging on crime, could have been not entirely unlike Governor Deal before her, better positioned to deliver on some reforms the left wing of the party has been fighting for — especially considering how, over the past year, reformists have experienced backlashes in places like San Francisco and New York. Kim Jackson, the chaplain at the Brooks protests, has since been elected to the State Senate, and she told me she supported Willis with a sense of excitement: A Black woman running on an anti-death-penalty platform seemed about as progressive as she could hope for. But three months into Willis’s tenure, a horrific mass shooting occurred at multiple spas in and around Atlanta, leaving eight dead, mostly Asian women, in what appeared to be a hate crime. Not long after, Willis announced that she would seek the death penalty for the accused shooter. And though Willis campaigned on pretrial diversion in lieu of prison time as one of her major reform issues, a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on overcrowded and unsafe conditions at the Fulton County Jail cited insufficient use of diversion and a failure to indict arrested individuals in a timely manner as two major factors.Willis told me the report was “a joke” and offered several arguments for why the data was flawed. “We’ve probably got 25 people in Fulton County Jail on a misdemeanor, and they’re there for 48 hours,” she said. “Unfortunately,” she added, “a lot of people with crimes that I think a regular citizen would say, ‘Hey, they need to stay in jail, they burglarized my house’ — that’s not even the kind of people that stay in jail here. People are given bail.”But the morning after we spoke, I sat in the back of a courtroom where the judge was holding a series of preliminary hearings for jail inmates, all Black men, who had been arrested and held since mid-July. One, accused of stealing equipment from a landscaping truck, had been in jail for 112 days; another, accused of smashing storefront windows, had been locked up for 116. It turned out that the initial police report had overestimated the amount of damage, presenting the crime as a felony rather than what it actually was, a misdemeanor.Nearly two years into Willis’s term, “I give her all the positive marks for going after President Trump,” Jackson told me. “I think it’s a courageous move. And I think it’s the right move.” She paused. “Yeah, that’s my praise.” And her criticism? Jackson sighed and said Willis had come to the State Senate to make a presentation about public safety, talking about gangs and other crime. Jackson had studied local crime statistics during the pandemic, however, and found a more complicated picture: murders up, other major crimes down. As Willis spoke, “I’m literally looking at the statistics — like, they’re on my desk right in front of me,” Jackson recounted. “So I just struggled with that,” she said. “I mean, I understand what it is to be a politician. And I understand that we have to respond to public pressure. But I don’t think we have to add fuel to the fire. And there have been times — I’m trying to be very careful here, because I respect her — but there have been times in which I felt like she added fuel to a fire that we could have easily put out.”The N.A.A.C.P.’s Griggs, who has known Willis since he was an undergraduate and working alongside her in the city solicitor’s office, calls her “a great lawyer, a consummate prosecutor,” but continues, “I just think that, you know, sometimes she’s a little too gung ho. And I think that justice is somewhere in the middle.” We met in his law office, and when I brought up Trump, Griggs pulled a book from his shelf and read aloud from Title 21, the state elections law, which bars “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” If you played the recording of Trump’s phone conversation to a grand jury and then read the state codes, Griggs told me, “they will indict him.” Griggs said it was interesting to find himself, in this case, on the “other side of the ‘v.’” — meaning, on the side of the prosecution rather than the defense. He didn’t say if this particular prosecutor gave him hope, but he sounded upbeat as he noted that the former president, if indicted, would receive his due process “not on Fox News, not on his Truth Social, but in a Georgia courtroom.”Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the opera director Yuval Sharon, and before that about the tangled legal aftermath of a deadly Waco, Texas, biker brawl. Nydia Blas is an Atlanta-based visual artist who is interested in storytelling through a Black female perspective. She was named one of The British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch in 2019. More

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    She Took On Atlanta’s Gangs. Now She May Be Coming For Trump.

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Late on the first Sunday of 2021, news broke of President Donald J. Trump’s call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to help contest the 2020 election. The next morning — Monday, Jan. 4 — was Fani Willis’s first day in the office as the district attorney for Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, as well as suburbs like Sandy Springs, East Point and Alpharetta. “Not the second day,” she told me when I met with her in November. “My very first day in this office — in that conference room, it’s all over the TV.” She found herself hoping that the secretary of state might have been “in another county when it happened,” she said, laughing darkly. He was not. And so, Willis said, “I’m stuck with it.”Outside Atlanta, Willis is now best known for this singular potential criminal target. Trump’s efforts to interfere in the outcome of the election in Georgia, in both phone calls to local officials and, potentially, as part of a scheme to organize alternate electors, have been under investigation by Willis’s office since February 2021. The Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone have testified before a special grand jury; so have former Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Raffensperger himself. In January, the special grand jury completed its investigatory work, submitting a report to Willis’s office and to a Superior Court judge, based on which Willis may or may not send evidence to a regular grand jury to seek criminal charges against Trump or his allies. If she does, there is every indication that she might bring one of her favorite prosecutorial tools to bear: racketeering charges, as laid out in the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, more famously used to prosecute the Mafia and criminal street gangs.Trump has attacked Willis on his Truth Social platform as a “young, ambitious, Radical Left Democrat ‘Prosecutor’ from Georgia, who is presiding over one of the most Crime Ridden and Corrupt places in the USA.” For a national audience not paying close attention to Atlanta politics, this claim might not sound fantastical. Willis, 51, is a Democrat and the first Black woman to serve as Fulton County district attorney — the first woman, period — and her victory in 2020 came amid a wave of reform-minded progressive prosecutors’ winning seats: George Gascón in Los Angeles, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan.Willis (center) with her team in 2022 during proceedings to seat a special-purpose grand jury in Fulton County to look into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.Ben Gray/Associated PressBut it was evident from the outset that Willis would represent something quite different. In July 2021, six months into her tenure, she appeared before the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, which holds bimonthly public meetings in an assembly hall in downtown Atlanta, to request additional personnel. By the time she spoke, the session had already stretched over eight hours, including several public comments questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. She was joined by Fulton County’s Sheriff Patrick Labat, who wore a tactical vest that made him look as if he’d arrived straight from a hostage situation. Willis had dressed more business casual — a black V-neck blouse with bell sleeves, her hair braided and pulled back — but it immediately became clear who would be taking charge.“We have a public-safety crisis going on,” Willis began, coolly scanning her audience. Crime was rising, she said. Because of court backlogs and mismanagement by her predecessor, she argued, more dangerous individuals would end up on the streets unless she could hire more staff. Crime, she warned the commissioners, would be the primary issue in upcoming local elections. “None of your constituents is safe,” she thundered, sounding like a prosecutor facing another jury. “Not yours, Mr. Pitts — Chairman Pitts. Not yours, Commissioner Hall. Not yours, Commissioner Ellis.”Her slides piled up dire statistics: rapes up 86 percent from the previous summer, murders up 25 percent, more than 1,400 unindicted suspects who could soon be bonded out of jail. “So maybe you’re thinking, Well, this ain’t really my issue, not in my district,” she said. “But no! The murders are occurring eve-ry-where.” Photographs of victims flashed on the screen. A woman killed in April in District 1. “This young lady, she was in her 70s. My mama would say that’s young. Her tenant bludgeoned her to death.” A man killed in District 3. “He’s a high exec at U.P.S. After a hard workweek, he went to have a drink. I think that’s his right. He walked up and became a victim to gang violence. He’s dead. I’m the one who talks to his mama. Next slide.” A little girl in District 3. “Her and her mama and auntie shopping at Christmas. Anyone here don’t go to the mall around Christmas? How about dead?” A Tony Award-nominated actor in District 4. “Gets in a verbal dispute, is followed home and shot in the back multiple times. Your district.”And so it went, a virtuoso performance that had Sheriff Labat praising her, before his own remarks, as “the baddest D.A. in the country” and the commissioners offering full-throated, even profane support for her efforts. “[Expletive] the lowest millage rate!” shouted Marvin Arrington Jr., District 5’s commissioner, referring to the local tax burden. “We got to get these people locked up!” That September, the commission voted to appropriate an additional $5 million for Willis’s office.Willis has described a number of her initiatives as D.A. as progressive, including a pretrial diversion program in which individuals accused of certain crimes can avoid being indicted by agreeing to restitution and community service. But her overriding focus has been public safety, and on that front she has been an unapologetic doomsayer, employing rhetoric on violence and gang activity that can leave her sounding, at times, as if she shares Trump’s dim assessment of local crime levels. Gangs, Willis claimed at a news conference last May, “are committing, conservatively, 75 to 80 percent of all the violent crime that we are seeing within our community. And so they have to be rooted out of our community.”To that end, she quickly moved to expand her office’s gang unit. She has also pushed the Atlanta Police Department to seek more gang warrants and personally lobbied for the Safe and Secure Georgia Act, an attempt to make the state’s already-tough gang laws even tougher, imposing mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders and increasing the power of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Willis suggested the name for the bill, which died in the statehouse; when a reporter from the Atlanta NBC affiliate pointed out during an interview that all 25 of its initial sponsors were Republicans, Willis responded that she was “happy to work with anyone who wants to help me in this fight against gang violence and crime.”The election special grand jury inquiry is far from the only case helmed by Willis to make national news — or to open her up to criticism. In 2014, she was lead prosecutor on an infamous RICO case involving 35 teachers, principals and other educators in the Atlanta public-school system, who were accused of changing students’ answers on standardized tests for financial gain, a prosecution many observers found excessive. And since she took office, her crackdown on gangs has brought her in direct conflict with one of Atlanta’s biggest cultural exports, hip-hop music, in another series of cases that have drawn fire for potential overreach. There was a sweeping 105-count RICO indictment against 12 supposed members of various sets of the Bloods, including the Billboard-charting rapper YFN Lucci; later came gang charges and an indictment under RICO against the acclaimed artist Young Thug and 27 supposed associates (including another wildly popular rapper, Gunna), with members of the group accused of involvement in murder, armed robbery, drug dealing and witness intimidation. At a news conference in August, Willis announced the indictment of 26 supposed members of the Drug Rich gang, who were accused of attempted murder, armed robbery and a series of home invasions and burglaries targeting celebrities including Mariah Carey and the N.F.L. wide receiver Calvin Ridley. “We have a message,” she told the assembled reporters: “Get out of this county or expect to start seeing sentences that go life-plus, because I am not going to negotiate with gang members.”‘We’re just going to do that case like every other. I don’t know why it’s shocking to people. If it turns out that charges are legitimate, we’re going to bring them.’When I visited her office late last year, Willis sat behind a large desk and indicated that I should take a seat on a couch about 10 feet away. Jeff DiSantis, her media-relations chief, sat in a corner, wearing cowboy boots and rarely glancing up from his laptop. Gov. Brian Kemp had just testified before the special grand jury that morning; if not for the rain, he might have walked over from his office in the Capitol building, only blocks away. Everyone I spoke with in Willis’s office referred to her as Madam D.A., and she faced me with her arms crossed and an apprising formality, the sort of person more used to asking the questions than answering them.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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    Manhattan Prosecutors Begin Presenting Trump Case to Grand Jury

    The Manhattan district attorney’s decision represents a dramatic escalation of the inquiry, and potentially sets the case on a path toward criminal charges against the former president.The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday began presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.The grand jury was recently impaneled, and the beginning of witness testimony represents a clear signal that the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is nearing a decision about whether to charge Mr. Trump.On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his lawyer entering the building in Lower Manhattan where the grand jury is sitting. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with the porn star, Stormy Daniels.As prosecutors prepare to reconstruct the events surrounding the payment for grand jurors, they have sought to interview several witnesses, including the tabloid’s former editor, Dylan Howard, and two employees at Mr. Trump’s company, the people said. Mr. Howard and the Trump Organization employees, Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff, have not yet testified before the grand jury.The prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate these witness accounts, the prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that might shed light on the episode.A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on showing that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payout from voters days before the 2016 election, a low-level felony charge that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case would also rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money in 2018.Still, the developments compound Mr. Trump’s legal woes as he mounts a third presidential campaign. A district attorney in Georgia could seek to indict him for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, and he faces a special counsel investigation into his removal of sensitive documents from the White House as well as his actions during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Bragg’s decision to impanel a grand jury focused on the hush money — supercharging the longest-running criminal investigation into Mr. Trump — represents a dramatic escalation in an inquiry that once appeared to have reached a dead end.Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a case focused on Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to secure favorable loans and other benefits. Yet in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and decided to abandon the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.One of them, Mark F. Pomerantz, was highly critical of Mr. Bragg’s decision and has written a book that is scheduled to be published next week, “People vs. Donald Trump,” detailing his account of the inquiry. Mr. Bragg’s office recently wrote to Mr. Pomerantz’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, expressing concern that the book might disclose grand jury information or interfere with the investigation.District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, center right, jump-started the inquiry last summer into Mr. Trump’s role in the hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesAlthough he balked at charging Mr. Trump over the asset valuations, this is a different case, and Mr. Bragg is now a bolder prosecutor. He has ramped up the hush money inquiry in the weeks since his prosecutors convicted Mr. Trump’s company in an unrelated tax case, a far cry from his unsteady early days in office, when Mr. Bragg was under fire from all quarters for unveiling a host of policies designed to put fewer people behind bars.For his part, Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and chalked up the scrutiny to a partisan witch hunt against him. He has also denied having an affair with Ms. Daniels. If Mr. Trump were ultimately convicted, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, though prison time would not be mandatory.“This is just the latest act by the Manhattan D.A. in their never-ending, politically motivated witch hunt,” the Trump Organization said in a statement, adding that reviving the case under what it called a “dubious legal theory” was “simply reprehensible and vindictive.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg’s office declined to comment. Mr. Pecker’s lawyer, Elkan Abramowitz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. McConney and Ms. Tarasoff declined to comment.The panel hearing evidence is likely what’s known as a special grand jury. Like regular grand juries, it is made up of 23 Manhattan residents chosen at random. But its members are sworn in to serve for six months to hear complex cases, rather than for 30 days, as is the case with panels that review evidence and vote on whether to bring charges in more routine matters.The investigation, which has unfolded in fits and starts for more than four years, began with an examination of the hush money deal before expanding to include Mr. Trump’s property valuations. Last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the hush money anew, seeking to jump-start the inquiry after the departures of Mr. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, the other senior prosecutor in the investigation.The district attorney’s office, working with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, is also continuing to scrutinize the way that the former president valued his assets, the people with knowledge of the matter said.Over the course of the investigation into Mr. Trump, the hush money payment was discussed within the district attorney’s office with such regularity that prosecutors came to refer to it as the “zombie theory” — an idea that just won’t die.The first visible sign of progress for Mr. Bragg came this month when Mr. Cohen appeared at the district attorney’s office to meet with prosecutors for the first time in more than a year. He is expected to return for at least one additional interview in February, one of the people said.The lawyer who represented Ms. Daniels in the hush money deal, Keith Davidson, is also expected to meet with prosecutors.Mr. Trump’s company was instrumental in the deal, court records from Mr. Cohen’s federal case show.Although Mr. McConney and Ms. Tarasoff were not central players, they helped arrange for Mr. Cohen to be reimbursed for the $130,000 he paid Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.Allen H. Weisselberg, the company’s former chief financial officer, was also involved in reimbursing Mr. Cohen. And, according to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weisselberg was involved in a discussion with Mr. Trump about whether to pay Ms. Daniels.Mr. Weisselberg is serving jail time after pleading guilty to a tax fraud scheme unrelated to the hush money deal, a case that also led to the conviction of the Trump Organization in December. Although he was the star witness for the district attorney’s office in that case, Mr. Weisselberg has never implicated Mr. Trump in any wrongdoing.Without his cooperation, prosecutors could struggle to link Mr. Trump directly to the misconduct.In 2018, when Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges stemming from his role in the hush money payments, he pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, saying the payout was done “in coordination with, and at the direction of” the president. Federal prosecutors agreed that Mr. Trump was behind the deal but never charged him or his company with a crime.The cooperation of Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, will be key to the prosecution’s case against Mr. Trump.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesThere is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump was involved: He and Mr. Cohen spoke by phone twice the day before Mr. Cohen wired the payment to Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, according to records in the federal case.For prosecutors, the core of any possible case is the way in which Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Ms. Daniels and how the company recorded that payment. According to court papers in Mr. Cohen’s federal case, Mr. Trump’s company falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses.The district attorney’s office now appears to be focusing on whether erroneously classifying the payments to Mr. Cohen as a legal expense ran afoul of a New York law that prohibits the falsifying of business records.Violations of that law can be charged as a misdemeanor. To make it a felony, prosecutors would need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the records to help commit or conceal a second crime — in this case, violating a New York State election law, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. That second aspect has largely gone untested, and would therefore make for a risky legal case against any defendant, let alone the former president.Defense lawyers might also argue that Mr. Trump, who was a first-time presidential candidate, did not know that the payments violated election law. And they could take aim at Mr. Cohen, arguing that he is a convicted criminal who has an ax to grind against Mr. Trump.In its statement, the Trump Organization noted that “the narrow issue of whether payments to Michael Cohen were properly recorded in a personal accounting ledger back in 2017 was thoroughly examined” by the federal prosecutors who charged Mr. Cohen and concluded he had engaged in a “pattern of deception.”Mr. Pecker’s testimony, however, could bolster the prosecution’s contention that Mr. Trump was involved in planning the hush money payment. A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, the publisher agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign. He agreed to this at a meeting in Mr. Trump’s office.In October 2016, Ms. Daniels’s agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling exclusive rights to her story to The National Enquirer, which would then never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”But Mr. Pecker balked at the deal. He and the tabloid’s editor, Mr. Howard, agreed that Mr. Cohen would have to deal with Ms. Daniels’s team directly.When Mr. Cohen was slow to pay, Mr. Howard pressed him to get the deal done, lest Ms. Daniels reveal their discussions about suppressing her story. “We have to coordinate something,” Mr. Howard texted Mr. Cohen in late October 2016, “or it could look awfully bad for everyone.”Two days later, Mr. Cohen transferred the $130,000 to an account held by Ms. Daniels’s attorney.Michael Rothfeld More

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    George Santos Faces an Investigation and Public Dismay

    The Nassau County district attorney said her office would examine Mr. Santos, who has admitted lying about his work and educational history during his campaign.Days after Representative-elect George Santos admitted misrepresenting his background, a Long Island prosecutor said she would investigate whether he had committed any crimes, while those who supported his campaign expressed mixed emotions about the revelations now swirling around him.Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County, N.Y., district attorney, said in a statement that the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-elect Santos are nothing short of stunning.”“No one is above the law, and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it,” Ms. Donnelly, a Republican like Mr. Santos, said in the statement, which was first reported by Newsday.Ms. Donnelly’s statement added to the growing pressure on Mr. Santos, who was elected in November to represent northern Nassau County and northeast Queens in Congress beginning in January but who has come under scrutiny after The New York Times uncovered numerous discrepancies in his campaign biography and in his descriptions of his business dealings.In interviews with several other media outlets on Monday, Mr. Santos confirmed some of the inaccuracies identified by The Times. He admitted that he had lied about graduating from Baruch College — he said he does not have a college degree — and that he had made misleading claims about working for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.Mr. Santos also acknowledged not having earned substantial income as a landlord, something he claimed as a credential during the campaign. In making his admissions, he has sought to explain his dishonesty as little more than routine résumé padding.But among more than two dozen Long Island residents interviewed on Wednesday, many, including some who said they had supported Mr. Santos, expressed disappointment at his actions and anger over his explanations.Felestasia Mawere, who said she had voted for Mr. Santos and had given money to his campaign, insisted that he should not serve in Congress after admitting to having misled voters.Felestasia Mawere, an accountant from Manhasset, N.Y., voted for Representative-elect George Santos. But now she said he should resign after lying to voters about his background.Johnny Milano for The New York Times“He cheated,” Ms. Mawere, an accountant who lives in Manhasset, said. Of the falsehoods in his biography, she added, “He intentionally put that information knowing that it would persuade voters like me to vote for him.”Nonetheless, Mr. Santos appeared to retain the support of many in his party, including those who are set to be his constituents.Jackie Silver, of Great Neck, said she had voted for Mr. Santos and would do so again. Ms. Silver said that those calling for him to face further investigation, or even relinquish his seat, were only targeting him because he is a Republican.“When they don’t like someone, they really go after them,” Ms. Silver, a courier for Uber Eats and DoorDash, said, before echoing Mr. Santos’s primary defense: “Everyone fabricates their résumé. I’m not saying it’s correct.”Others who made financial contributions to Mr. Santos’s campaign did not appear ready to cast him aside, although only a few of about three dozen donors contacted for comment responded.Lee Mallett, a general contractor from Louisiana and the chairman of the state contractors’ board there, said Mr. Santos’s immediate task was straightforward.“He has to ask for forgiveness, and he’ll be forgiven,” Mr. Mallett, a registered Republican, said. He added: “He’s just making it way too complicated. It’s really simple.”Barbara Vissichelli of Glen Cove, N.Y., said that she had met Mr. Santos while helping to register voters and had bonded with him over their shared love of animals. Ms. Vissichelli contributed $2,900 to his campaign and said she would continue to support him.“He was never untruthful with me,” she said.House Republican leaders have so far been silent amid the persistent questions about Mr. Santos, but he has gotten a tougher reception close to home. Ms. Donnelly is just one of several Long Island Republicans to show a willingness to examine him closely over his statements during the campaign and on his financial disclosure forms.On Tuesday, Representative-elect Nick LaLota, a Republican who won election in a neighboring Long Island district, said the House Ethics Committee should investigate Mr. Santos. Nassau County’s Republican Party chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., said he “expected more than just a blanket apology” from Mr. Santos.Another incoming member of New York’s Republican House delegation, Mike Lawler of Rockland County, sounded a similar refrain.“Attempts to blame others or minimize his actions are only making things worse and a complete distraction from the task at hand,” Mr. Lawler said in a message posted on Twitter. He added that Mr. Santos should “cooperate fully” with any investigations.Anne Donnelly, the Nassau County district attorney, said the “numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with” Mr. Santos were “nothing short of stunning”Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMr. Santos and his representatives have not responded to The Times’s repeated requests for comment, including to detailed questions raised by the newspaper’s reporting and to an email seeking a response to Ms. Donnelly’s statement.In an interview broadcast on Fox News Tuesday night, Mr. Santos again asserted that he had merely “embellished” his résumé. The interviewer, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic member of Congress who left the party in October, challenged him bluntly.“These are blatant lies,” Ms. Gabbard said. “And it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you’re standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.”On Wednesday, one more possible misrepresentation emerged. During his first campaign, Mr. Santos said on his website and on the campaign trail that he attended the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in Riverdale in the Bronx, but that his family’s financial difficulties caused him to drop out and get a high school equivalency diploma.But a spokesman for the school told The Washington Post that it could not locate records of Mr. Santos’s attendance, using several variations of his name. The spokesman, Ed Adler, confirmed that report to The Times. Mr. Santos’s press team did not respond to a request for comment.Questions also remain about how Mr. Santos has generated enough personal wealth to be able, as campaign finance filings show, to lend his campaign $700,000. Mr. Santos has said his money comes from his company, the Devolder Organization, but he has provided little information about its operations.On Wednesday, the news site Semafor published an interview with Mr. Santos in which he said his work involved “deal building” and “specialty consulting” for a network of 15,000 wealthy people, family offices, endowments and institutions.As an example, he said, he might help one client sell a plane or a boat to someone else, and that he would receive fees or commissions on such sales. But he provided no details on his contracts or clients to Semafor and has not answered similar questions from The Times.Mr. Santos’s exercise in damage control has also involved cleaning up his personal biography, which was removed from his campaign website for most of Tuesday. By the time an updated version appeared on Wednesday, it had been stripped of several significant details.Gone, for instance, was the claim that he had received a degree from Baruch College. (Another profile of him, on the House Republicans’ campaign committee website, said he had studied at New York University; that information is now gone as well.)Mr. Santos’s campaign biography also no longer mentions work on Wall Street, including his previous claims that he was a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” who had taken part in “landmark deals.” A reference to Mr. Santos’s mother working her “way up to be the first female executive at a major financial institution” has also been expunged.Mr. Santos also deleted a reference to past philanthropic efforts. He previously claimed he had founded and run a tax-exempt charity, Friends of Pets United. The Internal Revenue Service and the New York and New Jersey attorney general’s offices said they had no records of a registered charity with that name.In an interview with the political publication City & State, Mr. Santos said he was not the charity’s sole owner and that he was responsible for the “grunt work.” But he did not address the lack of official documents related to the organization and was not questioned further about whether it was tax-exempt as he had claimed.The revised biography now also omits any mention of where Mr. Santos lives, another detail thrown into doubt by the The Times’s reporting.Dana Rubinstein More

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    Running Against Hochul, Lee Zeldin Finds Another Target: Alvin Bragg

    When he was running in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney in 2021, Alvin L. Bragg made a promise for his first day: He would stop prosecuting low-level crimes and incarcerate only people accused of the most serious offenses.Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor in 2022, has made his own Day 1 promise: If elected, he will inform Mr. Bragg that he is being removed from office for refusing to enforce the law.Mr. Zeldin has made that pledge repeatedly throughout his campaign, turning a local prosecutor into the unlikely focal point of a race for the state’s highest office, which has tightened in recent weeks. He used a debate Tuesday night against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, to attack Mr. Bragg for what he said was a failure to do the job of district attorney.But there is little that suggests that Mr. Bragg’s approach to serious crime differs significantly from that of other city prosecutors, including his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and the Brooklyn District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez. Murders and shootings are down in Manhattan this year; though some other major crimes are up, including robbery, burglary and grand larceny, those trends are broadly in line with crime trends citywide.Mr. Zeldin’s promise to remove Mr. Bragg, the first Black Manhattan district attorney, is representative of a dynamic informing races all over the country: As some types of crime have risen in cities nationwide, Republicans have sought to capitalize on some voters’ unease with calls from progressive Democrats to overhaul the criminal justice system.Mr. Zeldin would not simply be able to show Mr. Bragg the door. New York’s Constitution grants the governor the power to remove certain public officers, but it calls for those facing removal to be given the charges against them and an opportunity to defend themselves. Mr. Bragg’s office can be expected to fight any removal effort.The Republican candidate’s attack on the district attorney’s office has placed Mr. Bragg in an unusual position. Just a year ago, he was elected with 84 percent of the vote against his Republican opponent.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Mr. Zeldin’s pledge to push him out “is an authoritarian move,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government advocacy group. “If the voters recall a D.A., that’s the will of the voters. But for some other entity to override the will of the voters is antithetical to our system of governance.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin’s campaign did not return phone calls or respond to emails with questions about the pledge, including whether the candidate saw something uniquely improper about Mr. Bragg’s tenure. In an appearance on Fox News in July, Mr. Zeldin said that Mr. Bragg had been refusing to enforce the law since taking office, declining to prosecute some crimes while prosecuting others as lesser offenses.“Lee Zeldin is attempting to overturn the will of Manhattan voters one year after a local election that Alvin Bragg — a career prosecutor — won in a landslide,” said Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg. “This pledge, which is grounded in blatant fearmongering while deliberately ignoring facts and reality, is a direct attack on democracy.”Mr. Bragg’s campaign promise and the “Day 1 memo” that implemented it helped lock in public perception of his tenure, although he soon revised his policies to clarify that his prosecutors had the final authority when it came to decisions about charging and bail. But the memo has continued to define him in the eyes of skeptics, particularly after the Police Department commissioner, Keechant Sewell, sent an email to officers saying that she was concerned about the policies’ implications for public safety, officer safety and justice for victims of crimes.Mr. Zeldin, already a candidate, sent his first tweet calling for Mr. Bragg to be fired the day after Ms. Sewell sent her email and has since made the call a staple of his campaign.Until recently, he had promised to remove the district attorney on his first day in the governor’s office. During a Tuesday debate against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, he amended that, saying instead, “I’m going to remove him as soon as I can.”Lee Zeldin was already running for governor when Mr. Bragg took office, and pounced on an early memo that outlined the new district attorney’s vision.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesQuestions about his motivation may also complicate his plans: Mr. Bragg’s office is currently trying a criminal case against the family business of Donald J. Trump, an ally of Mr. Zeldin’s, and the district attorney’s investigation into the former president himself is “active and ongoing,” Mr. Bragg said last month.A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin, who has been a fervent backer of the former president, did not respond to a question about how the trial and investigation influenced his promise.There is precedent in New York for the removal of district attorneys. In 1874, and then again in 1900, a governor forced a New York City district attorney from office. And in the first half of the 20th century, several were either elbowed out of the way on specific cases or subject to hearings about whether they should be removed.Mr. Bragg, however, would be one of few to have his position challenged in the past 50 years.In 1973, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller began proceedings to remove the Queens district attorney after the prosecutor was indicted on charges of covering up a criminal investigation. (The district attorney resigned before the process ran its course.) In the 1990s, Gov. George Pataki removed the Bronx district attorney from a specific prosecution in a fight that reached New York’s highest court, which decided in favor of Mr. Pataki.The power to remove public officers is delineated briefly in New York’s state Constitution and elaborated on in the state’s public officers law. The measure appears to give the governor broad discretion in determining the process, outside of the hearing mandated by the Constitution. When past governors ordered removals, the process in most cases took several months, with a hearing involving witnesses, an accusation of wrongdoing and a defense.Prosecutors who share Mr. Bragg’s values say it is no coincidence that Mr. Zeldin has opted to challenge him.“Alvin’s a Harvard graduate, an accomplished lawyer, and now the city’s chief law enforcement officer, but he’s also a Black man from Harlem,” said Jarvis Idowu, a former Manhattan prosecutor. “That means, like Willie Horton and countless others, he’s easy fodder for this kind of dog-whistle scare tactic.”Victim rights advocates and others have said that Mr. Zeldin is well within his rights to remove Mr. Bragg — and that other sitting district attorneys should take note.“I’m in full agreement with it,” said Jennifer Harrison, the founder of Victims Rights NY, of Mr. Zeldin’s pledge. “Any district attorney that refuses to enforce the law or do their job should get their act together and be on notice if he gets elected.”Mr. Bragg is part of a movement of recently elected prosecutors who have pledged to adapt more lenient policies, saying that the impact of prosecution has fallen disproportionately on Black and brown people and arguing that harshly prosecuting petty crime is counterproductive. When Mr. Bragg announced his campaign in the summer of 2019, those candidates had won in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.Many have since been challenged, either in recall elections or by other elected officials who disagree with their policies. In San Francisco, the district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in June by a coalition of moderate voters incensed by the rise in property and quality-of-life crimes during the pandemic. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state’s attorney in August, citing statements that Mr. Warren had made declining to prosecute those who sought abortions or gender-affirming health care.And on Wednesday, Republicans in the Pennsylvania House filed articles of impeachment against the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, accusing him of failing to uphold the law.In an interview, Mr. Boudin said that Mr. Zeldin’s pledge and the other challenges to elected prosecutors all sprang from the same playbook.Republicans and police unions, he said, were “very intentionally deploying policies and practices to weaken and undermine and distract elected district attorneys who are part of a reform movement.”He added that he saw the trend as “intertwined with the Trump election-denying movement, that doesn’t care or respect the outcome of elections.”Michael Gold More

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    A Local Prosecutor Takes on Trump and Crime in Atlanta

    ATLANTA — Fani T. Willis strode up to a podium in a red dress late last month in downtown Atlanta, flanked by an array of dark suits and stone-faced officers in uniform. Her voice rang out loud and clear, with a hint of swagger. “If you thought Fulton was a good county to bring your crime to, to bring your violence to, you are wrong,” she said, facing a bank of news cameras. “And you are going to suffer consequences.”Ms. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., had called the news conference to talk about a street gang known as Drug Rich, whose members had just been indicted in a sprawling racketeering case. But she could have been talking about another crew that she is viewing as a possible criminal enterprise: former President Donald J. Trump and his allies who tried to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in Georgia.In recent weeks, Ms. Willis has called dozens of witnesses to testify before a special grand jury investigating efforts to undo Mr. Trump’s defeat, including a number of prominent pro-Trump figures who traveled, against their will, from other states. It was long arm of the law stuff, and it emphasized how her investigation, though playing out more than 600 miles from Washington, D.C., is no sideshow.Rather, the Georgia inquiry has emerged as one of the most consequential legal threats to the former president, and it is already being shaped by Ms. Willis’s distinct and forceful personality and her conception of how a local prosecutor should do her job. Her comfort in the public eye stands in marked contrast to the low-key approach of another Trump legal pursuer, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Ms. Willis, 50, a Democrat, is the first Black woman to lead Georgia’s largest district attorney’s office. In her 19 years as a prosecutor, she has led more than 100 jury trials and handled hundreds of murder cases. Since she became chief prosecutor, her office’s conviction rate has stood at close to 90 percent, according to a spokesperson.Her experience is the source of her confidence, which appears unshaken by the scrutiny — and criticism — the Trump case has brought.Poll workers sort ballots in Decatur, Ga., in 2021.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesShe tends to speak as if the world were her jury box. Sometimes she is colloquial and warm. In a recent interview, she noted, as an aside, how much she loved Valentine’s Day: “Put that in there, in case I get a new boo,” she said. But she can also throw sharp elbows. In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of a grand jury appearance by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, Ms. Willis called the governor’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused,” and “rude,” among other things.“You have taken my kindness as weakness,” she wrote, adding: “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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    How This ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Balances Politics and Public Safety

    As his peers around the country face fierce criticism, Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, is navigating a narrow path so far.On the first Sunday in February, Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s district attorney, sat in the front row at Antioch Baptist Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The visit was emblematic of Mr. Gonzalez’s approach to criminal justice: Alongside dozens of parishioners, he and several local officials and police leaders listened to music, prayer and a biblical account of healing by faith and touch.When the service was over, Mr. Gonzalez and a top police commander stepped outside and into a crime scene. Just down the street, at around 2 a.m. that day, an 18-year-old man had been fatally shot in his car — Brooklyn’s 11th homicide of the year.A few short hours and a few hundred feet apart, the two episodes illustrated the narrow path that Mr. Gonzalez must walk. First elected in 2017, he pledged to bring a modern, progressive approach — a prosecutor’s healing touch — to a criminal justice system that has long been seen as a source of inequity. But as he begins his second term, stubborn increases in shootings, gang violence and other crimes have focused the city’s attention on public safety and complicated Mr. Gonzalez’s ability to fulfill that pledge.Some New Yorkers — most notably, Mayor Eric Adams — have blamed the increases in everything from shoplifting to shootings on leniency in prosecuting lower-level crimes. Calls for a tough-on-crime approach have run up against efforts to reduce the city’s jail population and rectify decades of racially biased policing.Mr. Gonzalez joined other elected leaders at the Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn this month, a visit that was emblematic of this approach to criminal justice.Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesAcross the country, many of Mr. Gonzalez’s peers in what has come to be known as the “progressive prosecutor” movement — including Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s newly elected district attorney — have struggled to balance the competing demands. Although it is unclear what is causing the spike in shootings, their critics have focused on what they see as heightened scrutiny of the police, an emphasis on social services over prosecution and the easing of bail and sentencing laws.Faced with a spate of grisly crimes, rising public anxiety, relentless criticism from conservative commentators and open rejection by police unions, Mr. Bragg has spent his first weeks in the job clarifying and, in some cases, reversing some of his more ambitious proposals.Mr. Gonzalez has largely escaped such scrutiny, despite pursuing similar policies for years.How he navigates these at times conflicting priorities — reducing crime while making the justice system more just; responding to residents’ concerns without filling jails; serving victims while addressing the roots of criminal behavior — could be key in shaping the future of the city’s criminal justice system.“I know what works, and my strategy has not shifted,” Mr. Gonzalez said in a recent interview. “It’s my job to care about quality of life. What I am responsible for is safety — I am also a steward of public trust in our justice system.”He added: “Those are all things progressives have not gotten right in their messaging.”According to current and former colleagues, nonprofit leaders, academics, Mr. Gonzalez’s peers and other law-enforcement officials, his strategy boils down to this: Listen to the community. Work with the police. Do not speak in absolutes or make promises you cannot keep. Work quietly and steadily, making change case by case.A Career in BrooklynMr. Gonzalez joined the Brooklyn district attorney’s office in 1995. He rose through the ranks to become acting district attorney in 2016 and was elected to his first full term the next year. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMr. Gonzalez, 53, grew up in the East New York and Williamsburg neighborhoods, at a time when violence and drugs plagued Brooklyn.He graduated from John Dewey High School in Coney Island, then went to Cornell University and the University of Michigan Law School. In 1995, he started working at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, rose through the ranks as a prosecutor, and never left. He lives with his wife and three sons in Williamsburg, less than a mile from where he grew up.He became acting district attorney in late 2016, after his predecessor, Ken Thompson, died of cancer.When he was elected to a full term the next year, Mr. Gonzalez pledged to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country,” promoting public safety and treating Brooklyn’s minority residents fairly.Mr. Gonzalez and his advisers put together a vision for the office, which was discussed widely within the office and shared with residents and the police. Early release from prison would be the default position in most parole proceedings; intervention efforts would be employed to drive down gang crime; prosecutors would be encouraged to resolve cases without jail time. The plan also called for more vigorous prosecution of certain sex crimes — such as so-called acquaintance rape — and the addition of a hate crimes unit.When the plan, “Justice 2020,” came out, it was “a non-story, because he had already sold it and begun to implement it,” said Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who served as general counsel under Mr. Gonzalez, and ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Bragg last year. She and several other former colleagues said the quiet, incremental rollout was typical of his style. “Not because you’re trying to hide the ball, but because that’s sometimes the best way for public safety,” she said.In his first full term, Mr. Gonzalez continued the work he began as acting district attorney: He dismissed tens of thousands of summonses for low-level offenses, and virtually stopped prosecuting marijuana possession. He expanded a mentorship program that allowed some young men arrested with a gun for the first time to avoid prison, and he reached plea deals with immigrant defendants that allowed them to avoid deportation.Yung-Mi Lee, the legal director of the criminal defense practice at Brooklyn Defender Services, said an important difference between Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Bragg was that Mr. Gonzalez did not come out of the gates with a sweeping set of changes.Instead, Ms. Lee said, he had been “quietly implementing his policies, in terms of what kinds of cases should be prosecuted, which kinds of cases he has been declining to prosecute” — with some getting “a very hard-line approach.”“It’s all about prosecutorial discretion,” she said.When residents of Bay Ridge were upset about a group of men who often lingered on a corner near a school, drinking and urinating, Mr. Gonzalez said, his office intervened. Instead of seeking charges, the office contacted a charity service, and got a couple of the men into shelters.“Eric Gonzalez, rhetorically, is very progressive,” said Carl Hamad-Lipscombe, the executive director of the Envision Freedom Fund, a Brooklyn nonprofit and bail fund that pushes for alternatives to pretrial detention.“What plays out in court is often very different,” Mr. Hamad-Lipscombe said, with prosecutors from Mr. Gonzalez’s office seeking bail in cases that might not call for it.Working With the PoliceAfter historic lows in the years before the pandemic, shootings and murders rose sharply in Brooklyn in 2020. Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesOne factor that contributes to Mr. Gonzalez’s ability to walk the line between progressive priorities and community calls to tackle public safety concerns more aggressively is his diplomatic relationship with the Police Department, which he cultivated over a quarter century as a state prosecutor.“They have always been given a voice at the table,” Mr. Gonzalez said of the police.In 2017, the city’s largest police union endorsed Mr. Gonzalez in the Democratic primary, saying he “demonstrated a clear commitment to justice and fairness, as well as an understanding of the difficult and unique nature of a police officer’s duties.”Still, Mr. Gonzalez has occasionally faced criticism from the police. In 2019, when his office released a list of officers whose credibility had been undermined through discredited testimony or workplace infractions, the police union that once endorsed him said he had “abandoned his prosecutorial role,” siding with “criminals, not crime victims.”The department also objected strongly to his approach to gun possession cases. The police started to send gun cases to federal prosecutors instead; one of Mr. Gonzalez’s former top aides recalled that he had to work hard “to rebuild those bridges.”Mr. Gonzalez’s delicate approach to working with the police is rooted, observers said, in a fundamental understanding of New York: When it comes to law and order, much of the city can be somewhat conservative. In last year’s Democratic mayoral primary, Mr. Adams — a former police officer who ran on a tough-on-crime platform — carried many of the districts hit hardest by violent crime.“I constantly hear people say they want more cops — they just want their cops to behave differently,” said Richard Aborn, the president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, a nonprofit group that works closely with law enforcement and community organizations.Mr. Gonzalez, center, has forged collaborative relationships with the police while acknowledging that their approaches to reducing crime sometimes differ.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesBy the end of 2020, Brooklyn had tallied 175 murders and 652 shootings, compared with about 100 murders and 290 shootings the year before. Aggravated assaults also increased, as did burglaries and car thefts.Brooklyn reported some improvement last year: a 15 percent decline in murders and 20 percent fewer shootings. Robbery, rape and burglary also dropped. Mr. Gonzalez’s office worked with the police on four major gang takedowns.But there is more work to be done.“We became the safest large city in America,” Mr. Aborn said. “When you’ve had 15 years of those levels of safety, and suddenly random shootings and murders start to creep up — people being shot, people being pushed on the subway, bodegas broken into with guns, that is going to shake an already shaken city.”Mr. Gonzalez has argued that this is not a problem the city can arrest its way out of. Many of the concerns he hears, he said, are not about violent crime or gangs or gun violence, but about residents’ perceptions of an erosion of public safety.“You have to have your ear to the ground, because it really goes from community to community,” Mr. Gonzalez said.His office recently fielded a call from a chain drugstore in the Brownsville neighborhood that was being targeted regularly by several shoplifters who would get violent when confronted.“There are neighborhoods with one pharmacy,” Mr. Gonzalez said. If that branch shuts down, “Suddenly, that community doesn’t have a 24-hour pharmacy.”A woman in Mr. Gonzalez’s office who handles cases involving repeat offenders talked to the local precinct and set up a pilot program. Detectives in unmarked cars stationed outside the store arrested the shoplifters but, rather than jail or prosecute them, the district attorney’s office spoke with them about what was behind the thefts: Of the six who agreed to participate in the pilot program, two reported having mental health problems, three were homeless and all reported substance abuse problems.The six were referred to service providers, and Mr. Gonzalez’s office is tracking their progress.“To me, being progressive is not simply about not prosecuting cases,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “It’s about using the resources to protect communities.”Nicole Hong More