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      Maloney vs. Nadler? New York Must Pick a Side (East or West)

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      New congressional lines have put two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary. Barney Greengrass is staying neutral.As he sat in the shade of Riverside Park on a sparkling recent weekday morning in Manhattan, Representative Jerrold Nadler tried to make sense of how two powerful allies suddenly found themselves at war.A court-ordered redrawing of New York’s congressional district lines had combined the East and West Sides of Manhattan into a single district for the first time since World War II, putting Mr. Nadler and Representative Carolyn Maloney, a longtime colleague, on a potentially disastrous collision course in the Aug. 23 Democratic primary.Attempts to broker a peace settlement were made, but Mr. Nadler, over a chilled Diet Coke, acknowledged that they were somewhat halfhearted.He recalled telling Ms. Maloney in a private conversation on the House floor in Washington a few days earlier that he would win, suggesting she run for a neighboring seat.“She said basically the opposite, and so it was an impasse,” Mr. Nadler said, “and we left it at that.”On an island known for Democratic infighting, Mr. Nadler, 74, and Ms. Maloney, 76, have managed to coexist more or less peacefully for three decades.They built parallel political machines and accumulated important committee chairmanships. Along the way, they had become powerful stalwarts — if not political mascots — in their districts: Ms. Maloney, a pathbreaking feminist and the widow of an investment banker, represents an East Side district so wealthy it was once christened the silk-stocking district; Mr. Nadler, a proudly opinionated old-school progressive, holds down the West Side.But their long truce came to a shattering end last week, when a state court imposed a significant revision on New York’s congressional map. The new lines have roiled Democrats across the state, but perhaps nowhere has the change been more disruptive than Manhattan.“I’d say it’s sad,” Ms. Maloney said in an interview near her Upper East Side home. “It’s sad for the city.”The primary matchup between Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney may be one of the most bruising political spectacles in living memory, a crosstown clash between two respected party elders in the twilight of their careers. And it will play out in one of the most politically influential pockets of the United States — home to financiers, media titans and entertainers, and the source of millions of dollars in campaign donations each election cycle.Not since Bella Abzug challenged fellow West Side representative William Fitts Ryan in a 1972 race pitting two liberal icons against each other has New York City faced a primary contest with the potential to be quite so fraught.“No one ever forgot that,” Harold Holzer, a historian and former aide to Ms. Abzug, said of the primary contest. “Maybe this will be more heartbreaking than it is infuriating. But for those who lived through the first one and remained pained by it for years, it’s history repeating itself.”Representative William Fitts Ryan beat Representative Bella S. Abzug in a 1972 primary. He died two months later.Stanley Wolfson/World Telegram & Sun, via Library of CongressAfter Mr. Ryan’s death, Ms. Abzug defeated his wife to retain a seat in the House.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesAnd yet neither Mr. Nadler nor Ms. Maloney has wasted any time working the phones to pressure union leaders, old political allies and wealthy donors — many of whom the two have shared for years — to pick sides.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Allies of Ms. Maloney whispered doubts about Mr. Nadler’s health. (His aides say his health is good.) Mr. Nadler’s associates circulated old news articles about Ms. Maloney’s obsession with pandas, and suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is officially neutral in the race, really preferred him.For all their superficial differences, Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney have had broadly similar career arcs.Both came up through local New York City politics in the 1970s. Mr. Nadler was a precocious young lawyer who started a group of self-styled reformers, the West Side Kids, and won a State Assembly seat in 1976. Ms. Maloney, a former teacher, was a top legislative aide in Albany before winning a City Council seat in 1982. She was the first Council member to give birth while in office and the first to introduce legislation giving rights to same-sex couples.They arrived in Congress within two months of each other in the early 1990s. Mr. Nadler inherited his safely Democratic West Side seat when the incumbent died of a heart attack on the eve of the primary. Ms. Maloney had to work harder for hers, upsetting a long-serving liberal Republican, Bill Green, to win the East Side seat once held by Mayors John V. Lindsay and Edward I. Koch.Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney are among the House’s most progressive members and both lead prestigious committees. Ms. Maloney is the chair of the Oversight and Reform Committee, which most recently oversaw an overhaul of the Postal Service. Mr. Nadler leads the Judiciary Committee, a role that earned him national attention during President Donald J. Trump’s two impeachments.Neither lawmaker grew up in Manhattan. Ms. Maloney is from Greensboro, N.C. Mr. Nadler, the son of a one-time chicken farmer, was mostly raised in Brooklyn. Both have strongly rebuffed pleas to retire.“I’ve never been more effective,” Ms. Maloney said.Mr. Nadler, the city’s only remaining Jewish congressman, was even more direct: “No. No. No. No. No. No.”Ms. Maloney, center, at a 1992 reception for her and other incoming female House members.Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call, via Getty ImagesMr. Nadler campaigning in the Bensonhurst section in 1994, when the area was in his district.Donna Dietrich/Newsday, via Getty ImagesMs. Maloney enters the contest with an apparent, if slight, demographic edge: She already represents about 60 percent of the voters in the new district. The spread narrows among Democratic primary voters, according to data complied by the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.Political analysts are warning that the outcome may depend on who casts ballots in a primary in late August, when many residents of the Upper East and West Sides decamp to the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley.A third Democrat, Suraj Patel, is also running. His premise is that it is time to give a younger generation a chance to lead. He came within four percentage points of beating Ms. Maloney in the primary two years ago. (Mr. Nadler, by contrast, has not had a close election in nearly 50 years.)“If you are satisfied with the state of New York, the country or the Democratic Party, they are your candidates,” Mr. Patel, 38 said.For now, predictions about which candidate will win appear to correlate with proximity to the Hudson and East Rivers.“The West Side votes heavily, that’s to our advantage,” said Gale Brewer, a former Manhattan borough president who now represents the area on the City Council. She added of Mr. Nadler, whom she is backing: “He’s got a brain that is frightening.”Rebecca A. Seawright, an assemblywoman from the Upper East Side supporting Ms. Maloney, said that the congresswoman has “endless energy” and an innate understanding of women’s priorities that her allies believe will resonate with voters in a year when the Supreme Court may strike down Roe v. Wade.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      How the Manhattan DA's Investigation Into Donald Trump Unraveled

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      On a late January afternoon, two senior prosecutors stood before the new Manhattan district attorney, hoping to persuade him to criminally charge the former president of the United States.The prosecutors, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, detailed their strategy for proving that Donald J. Trump knew his annual financial statements were works of fiction. Time was running out: The grand jury hearing evidence against Mr. Trump was set to expire in the spring. They needed the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, to decide whether to seek charges.But Mr. Bragg and his senior aides, masked and gathered around a conference table on the eighth floor of the district attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan, had serious doubts. They hammered Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne about whether they could show that Mr. Trump had intended to break the law by inflating the value of his assets in the annual statements, a necessary element to prove the case.The questioning was so intense that as the meeting ended, Mr. Dunne, exasperated, used a lawyerly expression that normally refers to a judge’s fiery questioning:“Wow, this was a really hot bench,” Mr. Dunne said, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. “What I’m hearing is you have great concerns.”The meeting, on Jan. 24, started a series of events that brought the investigation of Mr. Trump to a sudden halt, and late last month prompted Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne to resign. It also represented a drastic shift: Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had deliberated for months before deciding to move toward an indictment of Mr. Trump. Mr. Bragg, not two months into his tenure, reversed that decision.Mr. Bragg has maintained that the three-year inquiry is continuing. But the reversal, for now, has eliminated one of the gravest legal threats facing the former president.This account of the investigation’s unraveling, drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people knowledgeable about the events, pulls back a curtain on one of the most consequential prosecutorial decisions in U.S. history. Had the district attorney’s office secured an indictment, Mr. Trump would have been the first current or former president to be criminally charged.Mr. Bragg was not the only one to question the strength of the case, the interviews show. Late last year, three career prosecutors in the district attorney’s office opted to leave the investigation, uncomfortable with the speed at which it was proceeding and with what they maintained were gaps in the evidence. The tension spilled into the new administration, with some career prosecutors raising concerns directly to the new district attorney’s team.Mr. Bragg, whose office is conducting the investigation along with lawyers working for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had not taken issue with Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz presenting evidence to the grand jury in his first days as district attorney. But as the weeks passed, he developed concerns about the challenge of showing Mr. Trump’s intent — a requirement for proving that he criminally falsified his business records — and about the risks of relying on the former president’s onetime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, as a key witness.Mr. Cohen’s testimony, the prosecutors leading the investigation argued, could help to establish that Mr. Trump was intentionally misleading when he exaggerated the value of his properties. The financial statements Mr. Trump submitted to banks to secure loans — documents that say “Donald J. Trump is responsible for the preparation and fair presentation” of the valuations — could also support a case.Mr. Bragg was not persuaded. Once he told Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned. Explaining the resignation to his team of prosecutors in a meeting a day later, Mr. Dunne said he felt he needed “to disassociate myself with this decision because I think it was on the wrong side of history.”Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz also bristled at how Mr. Bragg had handled the investigation at times. Mr. Bragg left the pivotal Jan. 24 meeting before the discussion ended, though several of his top aides stayed behind. And after that day, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz — two of New York’s most prominent litigators, who had become accustomed to driving the case — were not included in closed-door meetings where decisions were made.Mark Pomerantz, one of two lawyers who were leading a criminal inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump’s business practices. The two resigned last week after the investigation came to a sudden halt.David Karp/Associated PressMr. Bragg’s choice not to pursue charges is reminiscent of the high hurdle that others have failed to clear over the years as they sought to hold Mr. Trump criminally liable for his practices as a real estate mogul. Mr. Trump famously shuns email, and he has cultivated deep loyalty among employees who might otherwise testify against him, a one-two punch that has stymied other prosecutors in search of conclusive proof of his guilt.In the Manhattan investigation, the absence of damning emails or an insider willing to testify would make it harder to prove that any exaggerations were criminal. Mr. Trump, who has a history of making false statements, has in the past referred to boastful claims about his assets as “truthful hyperbole.”The interviews with people knowledgeable about the Manhattan investigation also highlight the success of Mr. Trump’s efforts to delay it.He fought many of the subpoenas issued by the district attorney. In one of those battles — for Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents — it took nearly 18 months and two trips to the Supreme Court for Mr. Vance’s office to obtain the records. As a result, the ultimate decision of whether to pursue charges fell to Mr. Bragg, his more skeptical successor.A public uproar over his handling of the investigation has added to the turbulence of Mr. Bragg’s early tenure.As he was weighing the fate of the Trump investigation, Mr. Bragg was also contending with a firestorm over a number of criminal justice reforms he introduced in a memo his first week in office. The memo immediately embroiled his administration in controversy, a public relations debacle that worsened with a handful of high-profile shootings, including the killing of two police officers in late January.Although it is unclear whether those early travails influenced Mr. Bragg’s management of the Trump inquiry, there is no doubt that they contributed to his frenzied first days in office.Mr. Bragg’s decision on the Trump investigation may compound his political problems in heavily Democratic Manhattan, where many residents make no secret of their enmity for Mr. Trump.Mr. Bragg has told aides that the inquiry could move forward if a new piece of evidence is unearthed, or if a Trump Organization insider decides to turn on Mr. Trump. Other prosecutors in the office saw that as fanciful.Mr. Trump has long denied wrongdoing and has accused Mr. Bragg and Ms. James, both of whom are Democrats and Black, of carrying out a politically motivated “witch hunt” and being “racists.”Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg, said that the investigation into Mr. Trump was continuing under new leadership.“This is an active investigation and there is a strong team in place working on it,” Ms. Filson said. She added that the inquiry was now being led by Susan Hoffinger, the executive assistant district attorney in charge of the office’s Investigation Division.Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne declined to comment.The Brain TrustCyrus R. Vance Jr., the previous Manhattan district attorney, began the investigation into Mr. Trump, including whether he had intentionally inflated the value of his assets to defraud lenders.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMr. Vance and his top deputies were riding high last summer.They had just announced criminal tax charges against Mr. Trump’s family business and his longtime finance chief, Allen H. Weisselberg. The next step for Mr. Dunne, Mr. Pomerantz and their team was to build a case against Mr. Trump himself.The two were suited to the task. Mr. Pomerantz, 70, had once run the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. He had also been a partner at the prestigious law firm Paul Weiss, and he came out of retirement to work on the investigation without pay.Mr. Dunne had begun his career trying cases as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, gone on to become a partner at another top firm, Davis Polk, and was a former president of the New York City bar association. As Mr. Vance’s general counsel, he had successfully argued before the Supreme Court, winning access to Mr. Trump’s tax records.Helped by lawyers from Ms. James’s office, which was conducting a separate, civil inquiry into Mr. Trump, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz pressed ahead with their investigation into whether Mr. Trump had used his financial statements to deceive lenders about his net worth and secure favorable loan terms. Mr. Cohen had testified before Congress that Mr. Trump was a “con man” who “inflated his total assets when it served his purposes.”By the fall, a number of the prosecutors assigned to the investigation thought it was likely that Mr. Trump had broken the law. Proving it would be another matter.Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, has been leading a parallel inquiry focused on whether financial statements for Mr. Trump’s family company intentionally included false information.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesSoon, some of the career prosecutors who had worked on the inquiry for more than two years expressed concern. They believed that Mr. Vance, who had decided not to seek re-election, was pushing too hard for an indictment before leaving office, and that the evidence gathered so far did not justify the speed at which the inquiry was moving.The debate was born of painful experience from past investigations, including one involving the Trump family. In 2012, in the first of his three terms, Mr. Vance closed an investigation into accusations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. and his daughter Ivanka had misled potential buyers of apartments at one of the Trump Organization’s New York hotels, Trump Soho. The decision trailed Mr. Vance for years, subjecting him to criticism after Mr. Trump was elected president.Concern among the office’s career prosecutors about the investigation into the former president came to a head in September at a meeting they sought with Mr. Dunne. Mr. Dunne offered to have them work only on the pending trial of Mr. Weisselberg or leave the Trump team altogether.Two prosecutors eventually took him up on the latter.Mr. Vance pressed on, and in early November, convened a new special grand jury to start hearing evidence against the former president. Still, he had yet to decide whether to direct the prosecutors to begin a formal grand jury presentation with the goal of seeking charges. As his tenure drew to a close in December, he consulted a group of prominent outside lawyers to help inform what would be his final decision.The group was referred to internally as “the brain trust” — a handful of former prosecutors that included two senior members of Robert S. Mueller’s special counsel inquiry into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.Before they all convened for a meeting on Dec. 9, Mr. Dunne and Mr. Pomerantz circulated hypothetical opening arguments in advance: one for the prosecution; another for the defense.In the meeting, which lasted much of the day, the outside lawyers raised a number of questions about the evidence and the lack of an insider witness. Mr. Weisselberg, who has spent nearly a half-century working as an accountant for the Trump family, had resisted pressure from the prosecutors to cooperate.The brain trust puzzled over how to prove that Mr. Trump had intended to commit crimes, and the group questioned Mr. Cohen’s potential strength as a witness at trial. A former Trump acolyte turned antagonist, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges of lying to Congress on behalf of Mr. Trump and paying hush money to a pornographic actress who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.Mr. Bragg, who had not yet been sworn in, was not aware of the Dec. 9 meeting.And there are differing accounts of how well the brain trust responded to the evidence, with one participant calling the reaction “mixed at best,” but another saying that there was agreement that the prosecutors had credible evidence to support charges and that no one recommended against a case.The deliberations led prosecutors to simplify the charges they planned to seek to make it easier to win a conviction, and Mr. Vance was soon persuaded. Three days later, Mr. Dunne sent the team an email announcing that they would proceed. The plan, he said, was to seek charges from the panel in the spring. Most of the remaining career prosecutors were on board. But that week, a third prosecutor left the investigation into Mr. Trump.‘Time Is of the Essence’Carey Dunne, Mr. Vance’s general counsel. A leader, with Mr. Pomerantz, of the Trump inquiry, Mr. Dunne became frustrated, and he ultimately resigned, over questions about the strength of the case.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesWith Mr. Vance about to leave office, the investigators’ attention turned to their future boss.Born in Harlem and educated at Harvard, Mr. Bragg won a hotly contested Democratic primary last year with a campaign that balanced progressive ideals with public safety. He had served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and also in the state attorney general’s office, where he rose to become a top deputy managing hundreds of lawyers.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More

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      Where the Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

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      One of the highest profile investigations into the former president appeared to stall on Wednesday, but several other inquiries are in progress around the country.The abrupt resignation of the two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump leaves the future of the inquiry, which had been put on a monthlong pause, in doubt.But that does not mean that the former president or his family business, the Trump Organization, are out of legal jeopardy.In addition to the Manhattan criminal investigation — which resulted in criminal charges last summer against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer — Mr. Trump and his business face civil and criminal inquiries into his business dealings and political activities in several states.Mr. Trump and his family have criticized the Manhattan investigation, and the other investigations, as partisan or inappropriate, and have denied wrongdoing.Here is where each notable inquiry now stands.Manhattan Criminal CaseThe Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has said that his office’s investigation is ongoing and that it will continue without the two prosecutors. How it will proceed is unclear, though the investigation has already produced criminal charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.In July, before Mr. Bragg’s election, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the Trump Organization with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from authorities.The office, then under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also accused Mr. Weisselberg of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that should have been reported as income.On Tuesday, lawyers for the company and for Mr. Weisselberg argued in court documents that those charges should be dismissed. The district attorney’s office will have a chance to respond before the judge overseeing the case decides whether to dismiss some of the charges.The case has been tentatively scheduled to go to trial at the end of this summer.New York State Civil InquiryThe New York attorney general, Letitia James, had been working with Manhattan prosecutors on their criminal investigation. But she is also conducting a parallel civil inquiry into some of the same conduct, including scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump’s company fraudulently misled lenders about the value of its assets.Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall, is expected to continue her civil investigation.The inquiry is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets — which Ms. James has said were marked by repeated misrepresentations — were part of a pattern of fraud, or simply Trumpian showmanship.Last week, a state judge ruled that Ms. James can question Mr. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, under oath as part of the inquiry in the coming weeks.The Trumps said they would appeal the decision. Even if their appeals are unsuccessful, it is likely they would decline to answer questions if forced to sit for interviews under oath. When another son of Mr. Trump’s, Eric Trump, was questioned in October 2020, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself, according to a court filing.Westchester County Criminal InvestigationIn Westchester County, Miriam E. Rocah, the district attorney, appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course to reduce its taxes. She has subpoenaed the company for records on the matter.But the Manhattan investigation, in which prosecutors had been bringing witnesses before a grand jury before pausing in mid-January, appeared to be more advanced.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More

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      As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

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      With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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      Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels and a Courtroom Time Capsule From 2018

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      In what may be the last chapter in their unlikely story, Mr. Avenatti cross-examined Ms. Daniels for several hours during his trial on Friday.In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.“Yes,” she responded.The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”Yes, she said.He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.She responded affirmatively.As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Igor Fruman, Former Giuliani Associate, Is Sentenced to One Year in Prison

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      Mr. Fruman was at the center of a campaign to damage then-President Donald J. Trump’s rivals, but was brought down by campaign finance charges.Well before the 2020 presidential election, when he was an associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Igor Fruman was on the front lines of a shadowy diplomacy campaign to advance then-President Donald J. Trump’s interests and damage his political adversaries.But an unrelated and much more mundane matter brought down Mr. Fruman: federal campaign-finance laws.Last year, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to soliciting foreign campaign contributions by asking a Russian tycoon for $1 million for American political candidates. And on Friday a judge in Federal District Court in Manhattan fined Mr. Fruman $10,000 and sentenced him to one year and one day in prison, in addition to the more than two years Mr. Fruman has spent in home confinement since his arrest.Addressing Judge J. Paul Oetken, Mr. Fruman said he had spent the time since his arrest reflecting on his actions.“It’s a shame that will live with me forever,” he said. “But I can assure you, my family, and the government that I will never appear before yourself or another courtroom again.”The sentencing closed a chapter for Mr. Fruman, who was arrested in 2019 at Dulles International Airport, along with a business partner, Lev Parnas, as they were about to leave the country.The two Soviet-born businessmen had worked their way into Republican circles in 2018, donating money and posing for selfies with candidates. They had dinner with Mr. Trump at his hotel in Washington, D.C., and became friendly with Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.Eventually, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were connected to investigations and an impeachment, assisting Mr. Giuliani as he attempted to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr., who ended up defeating Mr. Trump in 2020.Mr. Giuliani credited Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas with arranging a meeting with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former top prosecutor and a key figure in Republican attacks on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.And Mr. Fruman’s connections helped lead to a meeting between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangements. Mr. Lutsenko, who was helping Mr. Giuliani unearth damaging information about the Bidens, also wanted Marie L. Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, to be removed from her post. She was recalled in 2019.Efforts to oust Ms. Yovanovitch became a focus of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial and led to a federal criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He has denied wrongdoing.But before serving as foot soldiers in Mr. Giuliani’s campaign, Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were entrepreneurs who decided to create a company that would import natural gas to Ukraine.Prosecutors said they wanted to bolster the company’s profile and began donating to Republican candidates and groups. Soon Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were fixtures at rallies and donor gatherings in places like Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club. They were a memorable pair. Mr. Fruman, who was born in Belarus, spoke a mix of Russian and choppy English. The Ukrainian-born Mr. Parnas exuded sincerity.A donation of $325,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action, was reported as coming from the company formed by Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, called Global Energy Producers. That broke campaign finance law, prosecutors said, because the money did not come from the company but from a loan Mr. Fruman took out.Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were also accused of soliciting the Russian tycoon Andrey Muraviev to send one million dollars to them so they could make campaign donations. The goal, prosecutors said, was to influence candidates who would help a fledgling cannabis business the three had discussed.Communications obtained by prosecutors show that Mr. Fruman repeatedly pressed for that money, providing a bank account and routing number for a company controlled by his brother. Records assembled by prosecutors show that two companies owned by Mr. Muraviev wired $500,000 apiece to the company controlled by Mr. Fruman’s brother.Mr. Fruman also sent exuberant messages to Mr. Muraviev and others, at one point including a picture of himself with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who was then a candidate for the office, and writing: “Today Florida becomes ours forever!!!!” A week later Mr. Fruman wrote: “Everything is great!! We are taking over the country!!!!”According to prosecutors, more than $150,000 of Mr. Muraviev’s money went to Republican candidates in the 2018 election cycle, including Adam Laxalt, who was running for governor of Nevada and later supported an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there.Mr. Laxalt, who did not become governor, said he was suspicious of the donation and sent a check in that amount to the U.S. Treasury.After Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas were arrested in 2019, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not know the two men.Aggrieved, Mr. Parnas broke publicly with Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, turning over material to House impeachment investigators. In October a jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Parnas of several campaign finance charges including conspiracy to make contributions by a foreign national and falsifying records.A month before that trial began, Mr. Fruman pleaded guilty to a single count of soliciting a contribution by a foreign national.In a memorandum to the court, Mr. Fruman’s lawyers asked for lenience, arguing that their client should be sentenced to time served instead of prison.Because of the notoriety accompanying his offense, Mr. Fruman’s business had faltered, they wrote, adding that he had resorted to spending savings and selling assets and could ill-afford the fine of $15,000 to $150,000 that prosecutors said federal guidelines called for.The lawyers wrote that Mr. Fruman had no previous criminal record and would never again appear in court “in a criminal setting.” They also said that the financial hardship Mr. Fruman experienced, “irreparable reputational damage,” and the 27 months he has spent confined to his home since shortly after his arrest “serve as adequate deterrence.”“Mr. Fruman is a good, decent, and honorable man who puts his faith, family and country first,” his lawyers told the court, adding, “This is not a case where Mr. Fruman embarked on an effort to influence the outcome of American elections using foreign money.”Prosecutors countered that Mr. Fruman’s submission exhibited “a blatant contempt for the law,” writing: “He views this case as an inconvenience to evade, and not an opportunity for reformation.”Mr. Fruman, the prosecutors said, had been “trying to corrupt U.S. elections to advance his own financial interests.” More

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      Conflict Quickly Emerges Between Top Prosecutor and Police Commissioner

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      A memo by New York City’s new police leader sharply questioned Manhattan’s new district attorney over his strategy for prosecuting crime.New York City’s new police commissioner has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the policies of the new Manhattan district attorney, sending an email to all officers late on Friday that suggests a potential rupture between City Hall and the prosecutor over their approaches to public safety.The email from Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said she was deeply troubled by policies outlined by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, in a 10-page memo that Mr. Bragg sent to his staff on Monday. The memo instructed prosecutors to avoid seeking jail or prison time for all but the most serious crimes, and to cease charging a number of lower-level crimes.Commissioner Sewell, who, like Mr. Bragg, was just a week into her job, said in her email to about 36,000 members of the department that she had studied the policies and come away “very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the victims.”The email, which was first reported by WNBC-TV, suggests a looming conflict not just between them, but also between the new district attorney and the commissioner’s boss, Mayor Eric Adams.The collision course between the mayor and the district attorney was sketched out during the Democratic primary in the spring of 2021. Mr. Adams made a crackdown on crime one of the main themes of his campaign; Mr. Bragg, following in the path carved by a handful of prosecutors in cities around the country, pledged to help reshape the legal system, to avoid disproportionate punishment for first-time offenders or those struggling with mental health issues or poverty.In a statement on Saturday, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said: “We share Commissioner Sewell’s call for frank and productive discussions to reach common ground on our shared mission to deliver safety and justice for all and look forward to the opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings.”“For our office, safety is paramount,” the statement said. It added that contrary to the way that Commissioner Sewell and others had interpreted parts of the memo, the office intended to charge anyone who used guns to rob stores or who assaulted police officers with felonies. “All must be held accountable for their actions,” it said.To some degree, the emerging tensions between the commissioner and Mr. Bragg reflect a broader political argument between centrist Democrats across the nation looking to soothe voters worried about crime and a movement of progressive prosecutors that has pushed for more lenient policies to make the justice system more fair and less biased.Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has expressed serious concerns about Mr. Bragg’s policies.Hiram Durán for The New York TimesSome of those tensions are likely to play out in Albany this year in a debate over whether to scale back changes in a state bail law that went into effect two years ago, and that provoked strong reactions almost immediately.There is always an ingrained tension between the police and prosecutors that often centers on what charges to bring and, at times, whether there is sufficient evidence to make an arrest. For the police, in some measure, the job ends with handcuffs, while prosecutors are left with proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt or finding some other resolution. But such arguments do not often became public at all, let alone so early in a new administration.Mr. Adams has been complimentary about Mr. Bragg when asked about him in recent interviews, calling him a “great prosecutor” and declining to criticize the memo. Asked about the commissioner’s email, the mayor’s office responded with a statement from Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser: “The mayor has deep respect for the district attorney and looks forward to working with him and the police commissioner to make sure the streets are safe, and to discussing any concerns directly.”A police spokesman said the email “speaks for itself.”Mr. Bragg and Mr. Adams, both Democrats, have significant histories in law enforcement, and both have pledged some measure of reform. Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, stood out in a competitive primary vowing to balance safety with justice. Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has spoken out against police brutality and, while serving, pushed for changes within the department.Mr. Bragg is the first Black person to lead the district attorney’s office, Mr. Adams is the second Black mayor in the city’s history, and Commissioner Sewell is the first woman and third Black person to lead the Police Department.In his memo, Mr. Bragg instructed his prosecutors that unless they were required by law to do otherwise, they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for those who had committed serious offenses, including murder, sexual assault and major economic crimes. Others, he has said, would be directed to programs better equipped to deal with the issues that had led them to commit the crimes.The new district attorney also instructed his prosecutors not to charge a number of misdemeanors. Many of the crimes on his list already were not being prosecuted by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. But Mr. Bragg directed his staff to avoid charging several misdemeanors which previously had been charged, including resisting arrest.“These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime,” Mr. Bragg said in his memo.The directive on resisting arrest was among those that Commissioner Sewell expressed most concern about. She said that it would send a message to police officers and others that there was “an unwillingness to protect those who are carrying out their duties.”“I strongly believe that this policy injects debate into decisions that would otherwise be uncontroversial, will invite violence against police officers and will have deleterious effects on our relationship with the communities we protect,” she wrote.Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More

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      With Trump Investigation Unresolved, Cyrus Vance's Legacy Is Incomplete

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      Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s third and final term as Manhattan district attorney is ending, but his investigation into former President Donald J. Trump goes on.Much of the furniture had been hauled away. The walls were stripped bare. And the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., sat on a brown leather couch in his eighth-floor office earlier this month, considering the last big question before him as his term neared its end: Would he decide whether to charge Donald J. Trump with a crime?“I am committed to moving the case as far along in the decision-making as I can while I’m here,” he said.As Mr. Vance, 67, leaves office at the end of this week, that inquiry is still unresolved. He will hand the investigation over to his successor, Alvin Bragg.A Democrat who was only the fourth district attorney to hold the office in nearly 80 years, Mr. Vance chose not to seek re-election this year. He said he had promised his family he would not run again. “Twelve years is a long time to hold an office this volatile,” he said, adding, “It was time for me to write a new chapter in my life.”The fate of the Trump inquiry, which could result in the first indictment of an American president in history, will help shape the public understanding of Mr. Vance’s tenure.Asked how he might deal with criticism if the case is not resolved to people’s liking, Mr. Vance, who otherwise maintained a low-key congeniality during two recent interviews, grew animated.“Look, I’ve been criticized for a lot,” he said. “Do I like it? No. But do I have to put it all in perspective? Yeah. And if you don’t put it in perspective, you’ll shoot yourself. Because people are passionate and they’re angry, and people have only gotten more divided and more angry in the last five or six years than they ever were before.”Before he took office in 2010, Mr. Vance had worked as a prosecutor for his predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, a titan of New York City law enforcement. Mr. Morgenthau, who died in 2019, made his reputation as a crime-fighter when prosecutors were still venerated figures.Mr. Vance was handed a more complex task: to help reimagine the prosecutor’s role as crime dropped to record lows and the inequities of the justice system loomed larger than ever before.“I was inheriting an office that was very much a 20th-century operation in terms of its systems and its practices and its policies,” he said. “It was, ‘How many trials did you have?’ It was, ‘How aggressive can you be?’”Mr. Vance instituted a less sweeping, more precise approach to addressing gang and gun violence. He stopped prosecuting certain low-level misdemeanors, including marijuana possession, fare evasion and, earlier this year, prostitution.He moved his office into the digital age, using data to inform decisions. He started a cybercrime unit and used hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with big banks to fund programs that he argued would make the city safer.Mr. Vance’s close advisers say he sowed the seeds of a more progressive method of prosecution.“Law enforcement was just starting to change, and Vance came in as that was happening and really was a leader in shaping that conversation,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance.While some of Mr. Vance’s ideas seemed cutting-edge in 2010, he was overtaken in his appetite for change by his peers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and nearby in Brooklyn, where elected prosecutors enacted more lenient policies, and in some cases spoke more forcefully about the harms of harsh prosecution.“As we progressed in how we think about the best ways to keep communities safe and how to rethink the way prosecution works, he and his office simply could not keep up,” said Janos Marton, who fought to reduce incarceration in New York and briefly competed in the race to succeed Mr. Vance. “That’s really the story of his tenure.”Alvin Bragg, who won the race to succeed Mr. Vance, will take over the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s successor, Mr. Bragg, is a former federal prosecutor. The plans Mr. Bragg has committed to, which include lengthening the list of low-level crimes that will not be prosecuted and placing a renewed focus on accountability for law enforcement, put him in line with other newly elected prosecutors.Mr. Vance said he is hopeful about Mr. Bragg’s policies but is not convinced that they will be effective in reducing crime, particularly in the face of a sharp rise in murders and shootings that began last summer.“Alvin Bragg is a smart, experienced former prosecutor who I believe cares about public safety as much as anybody,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether going leaps and bounds further than we have gone in our time will result in continued lower crime rates.”Mr. Vance’s conviction integrity unit, his critics say, exemplifies his strengths and failings. Set up in 2010, it was one of the first such units in the country. It helped the office assess new cases, leading to dozens of post-arrest dismissals. And in November, its work led to the exoneration of two men who had spent 20 years in prison for the 1965 murder of Malcolm X.But the unit has been criticized for having done far less than it could have. Mr. Bragg, while campaigning in the Democratic primary, said it appeared to exist “in name only” and vowed to start a new one explicitly devoted to freeing the wrongfully convicted.Mr. Bragg will be the first Black Manhattan district attorney, and critics of the office hope he will address the harms they say it does to Black people, who continue to be prosecuted disproportionately. Public defenders who faced Mr. Vance’s prosecutors and assistant district attorneys who worked for him said in interviews that his office still treated defendants harshly.Jarvis Idowu, a three-year veteran of the office who helped draft its policy to stop prosecuting fare evasion, said that the leadership there “talked a lot about how important diversity was.”But, he said, all the talk did not result in changes to the office’s policies that were informed by those diverse perspectives. Mr. Idowu, who is Black, said he left the office in 2018 after being asked to seek a yearslong prison sentence for a man in his 20s who had used forged credit cards to buy food, and to charge a homeless man stealing salmon from a grocery store with a felony. Both men were Black.Mr. Vance noted that he had invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine his office’s record on racial disparities in prosecution soon after taking office. The institute found race was a major factor at nearly every stage of Manhattan’s criminal process.“I don’t pretend that I’m the most progressive prosecutor on race issues, but it is something that we never ignored,” Mr. Vance said. “Could we have done better? I think we could have done better.”Much discussion of Mr. Vance has focused on his most high-profile cases. Some decisions drew criticism early in his tenure. A 2011 sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was dropped after Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned the victim’s story.He did not charge two of Mr. Trump’s children in 2012, or Harvey Weinstein in 2015, and was criticized for dealing leniently with the disgraced gynecologist Robert Hadden, who was accused of sexually abusing nearly 20 women, but avoided any prison time.Mr. Vance later found success in high-stakes cases. He won a conviction of Mr. Weinstein in 2020, which Mr. Weinstein is appealing. He also convicted the murderer of Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared on his way to school in 1979. His office is again investigating Mr. Hadden, who has also been charged with federal crimes.Mr. Vance said he kept a promise to his family in choosing not to seek another four-year term.John Minchillo/Associated PressMr. Vance, like Mr. Morgenthau before him, has close familial ties to the highest echelons of American government. His father, Cyrus R. Vance Sr., was a U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. Early in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Vance expressed concern that the president was undercutting the rule of law, and his yearslong investigation into Mr. Trump — as well as inquiries into associates who were pardoned by the president in Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office — reflects that concern.In 2019, Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought a subpoena demanding eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax returns, beginning an extended legal battle between the president and the district attorney and delaying the investigation for more than a year.Ultimately, Mr. Vance won the battle. The Supreme Court decided in his favor, twice, most recently in February, victories he called a “high-water mark” in the office’s work. This summer, he indicted Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, in connection with what prosecutors said was a yearslong tax-avoidance scheme in which executives were compensated with off-the-books benefits like free cars and apartments.Mr. Trump has consistently derided the investigation as a politically-motivated “witch hunt.” Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers have said he will fight the charges in court.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Vance continued to push the Trump investigation forward. But the calendar was uncooperative, and the inquiry will not be resolved this year.Mr. Vance said that, whatever his critics might think of the Trump case — or any of his other actions — his conscience was clear.“I know what we did, I know why we did it and at the end of the day, that’s what I have to live with,” he said. More