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      Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's Likely Next D.A., Questions NYPD Over Eric Garner

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      Days before the election, Alvin Bragg, who is heavily favored to win office, is participating in an inquiry into Eric Garner’s killing by the N.Y.P.D.It was the week before Election Day, but Alvin Bragg was not glad-handing or fund-raising, not out on the campaign trail or meeting with veterans of the office he hopes to run.Instead, he was in a virtual courtroom, questioning a member of the New York Police Department about the events of July 19, 2014, the day that Eric Garner told a police officer who held him in a chokehold that he could not breathe.Mr. Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney who is heavily favored to win the office in the general election on Tuesday, has, for the last several years, represented the family of Mr. Garner as they have continued to seek details about the lead-up to his killing that day, an event that brought urgent attention to the way that Black men are policed in New York City and around the country.This week, that fight culminated in a judicial inquiry during which Mr. Bragg and others closely questioned members of the police department, shedding more light not only on Mr. Garner’s death but the departmental focus on fighting low-level crimes that led the police to pursue him in the first place.While Mr. Bragg could not have planned for the election and the judicial inquiry into Mr. Garner’s death to coincide so closely, the case drives home some of the key messages of his campaign: He has said that he will cease to pursue a number of low-level crimes, and has spoken frequently about police accountability.The district attorney works hand-in-hand with the New York Police Department and Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry — which highlights anew a shameful episode from the department’s recent past — indicates that his relationship with the department will be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.“I think that there are risks involved for him, because he is going to need to work with the police department as district attorney,” said Jessica Roth, a director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law at Cardozo University.But, she added, Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry was consistent with priorities he had articulated throughout his campaign.“The inquiry is to try to find out what happened, and whether people acted consistently with their duty,” Ms. Roth said. “Bragg has worked in law enforcement for most of his career and worked productively with police. Holding people accountable and thinking about issues systemically does not necessarily put one at odds with the police department.”Gwen Carr, center, the mother of Eric Garner, said she was grateful that Alvin Bragg, left, has stayed with the case. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Bragg, 48, is a former federal prosecutor who also worked at the New York State attorney general’s office, where he rose to become chief deputy attorney general. He is running to lead an office that handles the cases of tens of thousands of defendants each year, the majority of them built on arrests made by the New York police.Though the office can decline to charge defendants arrested by the police, it does not do so often: In 2019, under the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the office declined to prosecute 9 percent of all the arrests it evaluated.That number is low in part because the Police Department responds to policy decisions made by the district attorney. When prosecutors in the office stopped charging defendants with fare evasion, for example, arrests on that charge dropped.While that responsiveness is likely to continue if Mr. Bragg assumes the office, any disagreement between him and the department — or the likely next mayor, Eric Adams, who plans to restore the police’s anti-crime unit — may lead to public friction of the type that has become more common between prosecutors and police representatives, particularly in cities like Philadelphia where the police union has actively campaigned against the sitting district attorney, Larry Krasner.Mr. Bragg’s Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, has also called for the restoration of the anti-crime unit, and for a renewed focus on low-level crimes.Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former police officer, said in an interview that both prosecutors and the police had become more politicized in recent years, a dynamic that can stoke tensions, but that the police would respect a judicious approach from Mr. Bragg.“He has to be an honest broker,” Mr. O’Donnell said of Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg has made his own fraught encounters with the police a foundational part of his campaign narrative, and police accountability is at the heart of his résumé.During his second stint at the New York attorney general’s office, he led a unit charged with investigating the police killings of unarmed civilians, which was created in part as a response to Mr. Garner’s death. (Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, was present when Mr. Cuomo signed the order that led to the creation of that unit.)Upon taking office as district attorney, Mr. Bragg plans to establish a Police Integrity Unit that will report directly to him, siloed off from the rest of the office to avoid any conflict with other bureaus.Mr. Bragg has a long history of working with law enforcement agents. He is not widely seen as a bomb-thrower, but instead, a coalition-builder with an ability to make varied parties feel as if their concerns have been heard.“I say what I don’t want officers to do, but I think it’s important in the next breath to say what I want them to do: to be our partners in fighting against gun trafficking and sexual assaults,” Mr. Bragg said, adding that he had always been “profoundly aware” that he stays at his desk while law enforcement agents are in the field.“The police officers I work with are the ones who will then go do the arrest or do the search warrant and that’s challenging, profoundly important and can be dangerous,” Mr. Bragg said.Mr. Bragg did not grandstand or otherwise draw attention to himself during the judicial inquiry this week, as he questioned Lt. Christopher Bannon, the police commander who, after being told of Mr. Garner’s death via text message, said that it was “not a big deal.”Still, Mr. Bragg fought to nail down every last detail, asking a number of questions about a meeting at which the police department discussed cracking down on the illegal sale of cigarettes and the protocol of filling out a memo book. The judge, Erika Edwards, who has referred to the inquiry as a “trailblazing” effort at transparency, was occasionally compelled to hasten him along.Mr. Bragg mentioned his representation of Mr. Garner’s family with pride throughout the campaign and Ms. Carr has, in return, expressed her gratitude toward him, particularly for his presence in the courtroom over the course of this past week.“I am truly pleased he chose to represent me in this inquiry when he could be out campaigning,” she said. “He said he would see this inquiry through to the end. My family and I are grateful for that.”Troy Closson More

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      Thomas Kenniff, Manhattan D.A. Candidate, Sees a City on the Brink

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      Thomas Kenniff, who is facing Alvin Bragg in the Nov. 2 election, has focused his campaign on a recent increase in some types of crime.Thomas Kenniff believes that New York City is teetering on a precipice.Mr. Kenniff, the Republican candidate for Manhattan district attorney, is not referring to Covid-19 or climate-related disasters, like the flooding that killed 13 people in the city last month.No, it is crime that worries Mr. Kenniff — crime, and progressive policies that he believes have contributed to its rise, particularly the bail reform law that went into effect in January 2020, which stopped criminal courts from setting cash bail on most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.Though legal experts who have studied the matter say there is no clear connection between that law and the rise in some categories of violent crime, including murders and shootings, Mr. Kenniff, 46, is convinced that a link exists.“As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years,” he said in a recent debate with his Democratic opponent, Alvin Bragg. The election, on Nov. 2, will determine the leader of an office that handles tens of thousands of cases a year and conducts many high-profile investigations, including an ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, has an overwhelming advantage. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Manhattan by nearly eight to one, and residents of the borough — which Mr. Kenniff left for Long Island about four years ago — have not elected a Republican as their district attorney since 1937.Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney, supported the bail reform law that Mr. Kenniff has criticized.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kenniff, a major in the Army National Guard and veteran of the Iraq War, says he expects to compete with Mr. Bragg given the number of Manhattanites he hears from who are concerned about crime.“I do think there is something fermenting in response to what is happening on the street level that Alvin Bragg has not condemned in any meaningful way,” Mr. Kenniff said.Asked to respond, a spokesman for Mr. Bragg, Richard Fife, said that Mr. Kenniff had spent the campaign “making ridiculous attacks playing on people’s fears.”“Alvin Bragg understands from personal experience the safety concerns families face and the inequities embedded into our system,” Mr. Fife said.Mr. Kenniff has consistently asserted — as have other law enforcement figures, most prominently Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department — that the bail overhaul is partly behind the spike in certain categories of gun crime, which began in the summer of 2020.Experts disagree, and point toward similar spikes in murders and shootings in cities around the country, regardless of their bail laws.“There is no evidence linking the bail reforms to the uptick in shootings and homicides,” said Michael Rempel, the director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the mayor’s office, the state courts and other institutional players in the criminal justice system.Mr. Kenniff, who now works primarily as a defense lawyer, said that he sees a correlation and rejects arguments like Mr. Rempel’s.“I reject it based on what I’ve seen in my own practice and the people I’ve represented,” he said. “I reject it based on what I see on the streets.”From Long Island to IraqMr. Kenniff was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and grew up in Massapequa, in a waterfront house on the South Shore of Long Island. He attended the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. And he began to consider the possibility of being a lawyer, in part because of the unlikely influence of the actor Tom Cruise.“Whatever part he was playing, you wanted to do that,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I saw ‘Days of Thunder,’ I wanted to be a racecar driver. I saw ‘Cocktail,’ I wanted to become a bartender.”The movie that really influenced Mr. Kenniff was “A Few Good Men,” in which Mr. Cruise plays a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, military lawyers who prosecute and defend members of the armed services.After graduating from Hofstra’s law school, and spending several years at a law firm and the Westchester district attorney’s office, Mr. Kenniff began the commissioning process. In early 2005, he was deployed to a military base right outside of Tikrit, Iraq.While abroad, he defended soldiers who were charged with violations of military law and provided counsel to soldiers and civilians. He also sweated out a number of rocket attacks, said his roommate, Major Robert Kincaid, who added that Mr. Kenniff soon got used to the strikes.“We heard the alarms go off and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the shelter,’” Mr. Kincaid recalled. “And he looks at me and goes, ‘Are you going to do that? I think it’s safer in here.’”Mr. Kenniff returned to the United States toward the end of 2005 and after about six more months as a prosecutor in Westchester, he left the office to start a law firm with another veteran, Steven M. Raiser, where over the past 15 years he has done defense work for a wide range of clients.Mr. Kenniff spent long stretches of the pandemic housed at a hotel in Manhattan, like other service members, and on active duty at the Javits Center, which was transformed into a field hospital. During that time, Mr. Kenniff began following the nascent Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney and grew alarmed at what he was hearing.A Return to ‘Broken Windows’Eight candidates ran as Democrats to become Manhattan district attorney, including three without any prosecutorial experience.But as murders and shootings continued to rise in the early months of 2021, voters leaned toward more experienced contenders like Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Bragg won a close primary, leaving him poised to become the first Black Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Kenniff said he is concerned that Mr. Bragg — who supported the bail law and has pledged to dedicate new units in the office to hold the police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions — will implement lenient policies that will encourage crime.Asked about his own priorities, Mr. Kenniff said that he wanted to focus on reducing gun crime, which he believes means also cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.He said he believes in the merits of “broken windows” policing, the idea that actively policing and prosecuting petty crimes will have a healthy effect on the overall crime rate. The theory has been called into question by a number of criminologists and others, who say it naturally leads to discriminatory overpolicing.“I’m not trying to upend the whole concept of a prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I don’t need 20-page manifestoes about how I’m going to do this, this and that.”Mr. Kenniff has reserved much of his energy for criticizing the bail law, which was passed in an effort to ensure that poor people were not disproportionately penalized because they could not afford bail. The law effectively eliminated money bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but allowed for bail to be set on virtually all violent felonies.It was met with immediate resistance from opponents, who argued that it would lead to the release of dangerous criminals. In April 2020, the law was amended to allow judges more discretion to jail defendants. (It remains illegal in New York for judges to consider a defendant’s threat to public safety in setting bail, as it has been for the last 50 years.)The law remains a target of conservatives, including Mr. Kenniff, who says that along with the disbandment of the police’s anti-crime units and local politicians’ lack of support for the police, the law was key to rises in gun crime. He argues that the pretrial release of those charged with crimes like gun possession and misdemeanor assault has endangered communities.As of yet, there is no evidence of that. The mayor’s office of criminal justice has found that the bail law had no discernible effect on the rate of rearrest. And studies conducted in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which made similar changes, found that their rates of recidivism had not gone up.None of that carries weight with Mr. Kenniff.“The notion that these policies haven’t contributed to what is going on on the street is just utterly counterintuitive,” he said. “So would I be skeptical, am I skeptical, of studies and statistics that say otherwise? Sure.” More

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      Testimony at Lev Parnas Trial Offers Peek at His Place in Trump’s Orbit

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      Among other things, Adam Laxalt, a U.S. Senate candidate in Nevada, described his suspicions about a donation to his run for governor in 2018.Adam Laxalt was a Republican candidate for governor of Nevada in 2018 when he bumped into Rudolph W. Giuliani in a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.Mr. Laxalt, who, like Mr. Giuliani, was a staunch supporter of President Donald J. Trump, accompanied Mr. Giuliani to a balcony, and told him that the governor’s race was “very close.”Among a group smoking cigars and having drinks, someone Mr. Laxalt did not know spoke up: It was Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman.“He immediately offered to help my campaign,” Mr. Laxalt said on Friday while testifying as a prosecution witness at Mr. Parnas’s corruption trial in federal court in Manhattan. “He offered to throw a fund-raiser.”Mr. Parnas is charged with conspiring to make campaign contributions by a foreign national and in the name of a person other than himself. Among the contributions at issue is one made in the maximum amount, $2,700, to Mr. Laxalt in 2018. An indictment says Mr. Parnas made the contribution using a credit card belonging to a business partner, Igor Fruman, and another person.Later, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman became known for helping Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, as he oversaw an effort in Ukraine to uncover damaging information about Joe Biden, at the time a leading Democratic presidential candidate who went on to beat Mr. Trump in the 2020 election.Mr. Laxalt’s testimony illustrated how thoroughly Mr. Parnas appeared to have installed himself in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Mr. Laxalt was a co-chair of Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada and he supported an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there.The interactions between Mr. Laxalt, who is currently running for a U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, and Mr. Parnas also provided a glimpse into the life of a political candidate eager to keep money flowing to his campaign.Although Mr. Laxalt is well known in Nevada — his grandfather was Paul Laxalt, a U.S. senator from the state — he testified that his race against Steve Sisolak, the Democrat who ultimately prevailed, was a “long, grueling, very tense” experience.The day after the meeting at the Trump hotel, Mr. Laxalt testified that he and Mr. Parnas exchanged text messages and that he believed some of them were related to plans to attend a rally that was to include Mike Pence, the vice president at the time.The text exchanges continued for weeks. A pattern emerged, in which Mr. Laxalt asked Mr. Parnas about donations, and Mr. Parnas provided responses that were short on commitment.Mr. Laxalt’s apparent friendliness in his messages to Mr. Parnas may have been partly professional. On cross-examination, he acknowledged that he had referred to Mr. Parnas as “a clownish guy with a gold chain,” and wondered whether he was an oddball from Brooklyn with a home in Florida who was more interested in taking photos with candidates than in writing checks to them.“Are you going to deliver on this fund-raiser,” Mr. Laxalt texted Mr. Parnas at one point. Mr. Parnas suggested some possible dates. But they passed without the event taking place.Mr. Laxalt testified that he encountered Mr. Parnas at a rally for Mr. Trump in Elko, Nev. They also arranged to have dinner, along with a few others, at a restaurant in Las Vegas that Mr. Laxalt described in a text message to Mr. Parnas as “an old mob joint.” (Mr. Parnas responded “love it” and included a thumb’s up emoji.)At times, the two exchanged comments about the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a good friend of Mr. Laxalt’s whom Mr. Parnas was also supporting as he ran for governor of Florida.As the election neared, Mr. Laxalt kept inquiring about money. Mr. Parnas said he would bring Mr. Giuliani to Nevada to barnstorm on Mr. Laxalt’s behalf. Mr. Parnas also asked Mr. Laxalt whether he would like help in arranging a robocall.Eventually, Mr. Parnas told Mr. Laxalt by text that he could arrange for donations totaling $20,000 from three people. Mr. Laxalt was appreciative but he asked whether Mr. Parnas himself was going to donate.“I can’t,” Mr. Parnas replied, citing a Federal Election Commission matter, an apparent reference to a complaint that a $325,000 donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, America First Action, by an energy company started by Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas had broken the law.“My attorney won’t allow it,” Mr. Parnas wrote to Mr. Laxalt, adding that he had tried to get his wife to donate but that his lawyer had also vetoed that idea.A short time later, on Nov. 1, 2018, less than a week before Election Day, Mr. Laxalt’s campaign received a $10,000 donation from Mr. Fruman.Mr. Laxalt said during his testimony on Friday that he was suspicious of the donation and, on the “advice of counsel,” had decided to send a check in that amount to the U.S. Treasury. More

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      Alvin Bragg Likely to Take Over Trump Investigation

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      With his main rival, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceding, Alvin Bragg is poised to lead the investigation into Donald J. Trump’s family business.Alvin Bragg, a career prosecutor with experience taking on white-collar crime and corruption, is poised to become Manhattan’s next district attorney, a job that will include overseeing the most prominent and contentious criminal case in the United States: the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump’s family business.Given the overwhelming edge Democrats hold in Manhattan, Mr. Bragg is heavily favored to win the general election in November after his foremost opponent in the Democratic primary, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceded on Friday.If he wins, Mr. Bragg would immediately take over a high-stakes inquiry that on Thursday yielded a 15-count indictment against the Trump Organization, the Trump family business, and one of its key executives, Allen Weisselberg.The indictment charged Mr. Weisselberg in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on close to $1.8 million in benefits and bonuses and the company with profiting from his alleged actions. The charges were the first of what could be a number of others in the long-running inquiry, which will continue to focus on Mr. Trump’s company, as well as on the former president himself.Mr. Weisselberg has so far rebuffed pressure to cooperate with investigators. Should he continue to do so, Mr. Bragg would oversee any trial in the case. And if the investigation involving Mr. Trump’s business continues after the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., leave office in January, Mr. Bragg will take charge of the inquiry.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Bragg acknowledged the highly consequential nature of the investigation into Mr. Trump, but he said he was equally focused on other important tasks.“We’re also talking about the gun-trafficking issues, the scope of the entire system and the collateral consequences,” he said. “It’s all a profound responsibility.”Mr. Bragg, 47, would be the first Black person to lead an office that still prosecutes more Black people than members of any other racial group. During the campaign, he sought to balance concerns about public safety with a vision for a more equitable criminal justice system.A former federal prosecutor and deputy New York State attorney general, he led seven other candidates for the Democratic nomination when polls closed last week with the race too close to call.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who trailed Mr. Bragg by about three percentage points, had pinned her hopes on tens of thousands of absentee ballots. But as those ballots began to be tallied this week, they showed she was not picking up enough votes in key districts to cut into Mr. Bragg’s overall lead. On Friday, she ceded the race and congratulated him.“I spoke with Alvin Bragg earlier today and congratulated him on his historic election as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney,” she said in a statement. “We had important disagreements throughout the campaign, but I am confident in Alvin’s commitment to justice, and I stand ready to support him.”Tali Farhadian Weinstein campaigned on the Upper East Side on Primary Day. She conceded the race on Friday. Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMany of Mr. Bragg’s priorities and proposed policies align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorney’s offices around the United States in recent years. But he defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experience growing up in Harlem.Mr. Bragg’s supporters have said that his racial identity, as well as policies that account for the harm that prosecution can do to communities of color, was one of the key reasons that they favored him.Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor and a supporter of Mr. Bragg’s, said the combination was important to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety,” Professor Murphy said. But, she added, the district attorney should also “understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community as well.”Mr. Bragg said repeatedly during the campaign that he had sued Mr. Trump or his administration more than 100 times during his tenure at the attorney general’s office. He also said he expected to be attacked by Mr. Trump, who said this week that the investigation was a form of “political persecution” being led by “New York radical-left prosecutors.”Mr. Vance, who did not seek re-election, is coordinating his efforts with Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.Preet Bharara, a former United States attorney in Manhattan who supervised Mr. Bragg and endorsed his candidacy, said Mr. Bragg had varied experience as a prosecutor, and that his work on white-collar crime and public corruption cases could come into play in the investigation into Mr. Trump and the case against Mr. Weisselberg and Mr. Trump’s business.“He can handle this,” Mr. Bharara said.For much of the primary, Mr. Bragg was thought to be trailing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, another former federal prosecutor who also served as counsel to the former U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, and the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez. She dominated the fund-raising battle and gave her own campaign $8.2 million, more than three times as much money as anyone else raised overall, and led in most polls.But a late resistance to her candidacy grew, in part because of the money she spent on the race. On Primary Day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters from supporting Ms. Farhadian Weinstein during a radio interview, and cited Mr. Bragg and another contender, Tahanie Aboushi, as better choices.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a brief interview on Friday that she would continue to be an advocate for issues she focused on during the campaign, particularly violence against women, which she said was startlingly common and underreported.Mr. Bragg will face Thomas Kenniff, the Republican candidate, in November. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y., a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order. In recent weeks, he had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, but then switched to criticizing Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg’s campaign was helped by endorsements from several key figures and groups, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York; Zephyr Teachout, an activist and former candidate for governor; The New York Times Editorial Board (which is separate from the newsroom); and the political action committees of Planned Parenthood and Color of Change. Color of Change’s committee pledged $1 million to Mr. Bragg and spent close to $500,0000.Mr. Bragg made inroads with some unlikely allies, often through a willingness to hear and incorporate others’ positions. He impressed Five Boro Defenders, a public defenders group, enough that the group invited him to a “decarceral debate” in February where candidates were asked to explain how their policies would help reduce the number of people incarcerated in prisons and jails.“He was always the traditional prosecutor that probably fit most squarely into that progressive prosecutor peg and not necessarily into a decarceral peg,” said Amanda Jack, a member of the group. “But the consensus among us was that he was just really willing to listen and learn in the interview.”Ms. Teachout said that Mr. Bragg’s willingness to learn was exemplified in a memo that he prepared to walk potential supporters through his plans for the office. and that led her to endorse him. She called it “a really significant document.”The memo put Mr. Bragg’s priorities front and center. In it, he pledged to form new units to hold police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions; to provide more resources to bureaus that investigate white-collar crime; and to stop tying success within the office to conviction rates.“The need for reform in our office’s policies and practices is urgent,” the document concluded. “It is critical that the changes described in this memorandum take effect immediately.”Mr. Bragg, a lifelong Harlem resident, said he had been moved to pursue a career in law by his experiences growing up, including several encounters in which guns were held to his head by civilians and police officers.He attended Harvard and Harvard Law School, was a clerk for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., worked as a civil rights lawyer and later became a prosecutor, first in the New York attorney general’s office and later in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.When he returned to the attorney general’s office in 2013, he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians and eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.His classmates noted his potential when he was an undergraduate. A lengthy 1995 profile in The Harvard Crimson reported on his having said that he was unlikely to seek elected office. The paper was unconvinced.“Whatever he does eventually,” the article said, “today there is a definite sense of the anointed about him.” More

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      Bragg Holds Lead in Manhattan District Attorney Primary

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      Alvin Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, maintained a four-point lead over Tali Farhadian Weinstein. If elected, he would the first Black person to hold the office.Alvin Bragg was leading in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney as returns came in Tuesday night, maintaining a steady margin of about four percentage points over Tali Farhadian Weinstein in a race likely to determine who heads the most prominent local prosecutor’s office in the country.The winner of the primary will be heavily favored to win the general election in November and would lead an office that prosecutes tens of thousands of cases a year and is running a high-profile inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had long been seen as front-runners in the race, and they proved it on Primary Day, beating six other candidates by double-digit margins with nearly all of the in-person returns in on Tuesday night.A sizable number of absentee ballots — as many as 59,000, according to The Associated Press — had not yet been counted. As of midnight, Mr. Bragg’s lead stood at about 7,000 votes in the only major race on the ballot that did not make use of ranked-choice voting.The returns Tuesday showed Mr. Bragg performing particularly well on the Upper West Side and in his home neighborhood of Harlem, and he performed solidly throughout the borough with strong showings in every district. While many of his proposed policies and priorities align with those of progressive prosecutors who have remade district attorneys’ offices around the country in recent years, Mr. Bragg defied easy classification during the race, explaining the nuances of his positions by referring to his experiences growing up. If elected, he would be the first Black person to hold the office.“We are going to demand and deliver on both safety and fairness,” Mr. Bragg said in a speech at his election party in Harlem in which he acknowledged that there were votes still to be counted but declared victory and spoke as if he had already won. He pledged to help end racial disparities in the justice system​ and to run an office informed by his and his supporters’ life experiences.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said in a statement that the race was far from over.“We all knew going into today that this race was not going to be decided tonight, and it has not been,” the statement said. “We have to be patient.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who would be the first woman to hold the office, ran a more moderate campaign than most of the field, declining to join some other candidates in saying that she would not prosecute certain categories of crime under any circumstances. She raced ahead of the other contenders in fund-raising, bringing in at least $12.8 million, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign — causing her competitors and some observers to accuse her of trying to buy the race.Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who did not endorse a candidate, discouraged voters on Tuesday from backing Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.“Please do not support multimillionaires and billionaires who are just trying to buy elections and not supporting policies that will help us,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s focus on public safety separated her from most of the other candidates, whose strategies to make the criminal legal system less punitive may have made it difficult for voters to differentiate among them.The one exception was Liz Crotty, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who won the endorsement of several police unions and talked about the importance of public safety throughout the race.Three candidates without prosecutorial experience — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — ran to the left of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and Mr. Bragg, arguing that the office required fundamental change that no candidate with prosecutorial experience could deliver. That position ran counter to the messaging of Mr. Bragg, as well as a fellow former prosecutor, Lucy Lang, who also ran on the idea that she had the knowledge and experience to improve the office’s treatment of everyone it comes into contact with, including defendants.Ms. Aboushi, who was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, outperformed the other five candidates throughout the night, trailing only Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.If Mr. Bragg ultimately wins the nomination, he will be overwhelmingly favored in the general election against the Republican nominee, Thomas Kenniff, who ran uncontested. Mr. Kenniff, a former state prosecutor in Westchester County, a member of the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and an Iraq War veteran, has said that the Manhattan district attorney should be focused on law and order, and in recent weeks, had begun to attack Ms. Farhadian Weinstein by name, calling her “soft on crime” and saying on Twitter that her platform “promises to be the last nail in NYC’s coffin.”Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein both have substantive legal pedigrees. Mr. Bragg graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge in New York and worked as a defense and civil rights lawyer. He first worked as a prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and then returned to the attorney general’s office, where starting in 2013, he led a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He eventually rose to become a chief deputy attorney general.Erin E. Murphy, a law professor at New York University who supports Mr. Bragg, said that the combination of the candidate’s policies and his racial identity was key to understanding how he might lead the office.“When we’re in this moment of racial reckoning, it’s really important the leader of the Manhattan D.A.’s office understands the real concerns about public safety that exist in our communities but also that they understand that the police themselves can be a harm-causing agent in the community,” she said.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein graduated from Yale Law School, clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Supreme Court, served as counsel to the former United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and after a stint as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn was on the leadership team in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.The district attorney’s office has had only two leaders in close to 50 years, and the current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has held his seat for more than a decade. He was considered one of the most progressive prosecutors in the United States when he was first elected in 2009. But since he took office, a wave of prosecutors have won elections by pledging to make their offices less punitive and less racist, a trend that has changed the way that such races are run.In the opening months of this year, it looked as if the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney would follow suit, with Ms. Aboushi, Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart tipping the balance of the race toward the left. But as Ms. Farhadian Weinstein emerged as a financial powerhouse and gun violence rose in certain areas of the city, the focus of the race changed, and she and Mr. Bragg began to be seen as front-runners. More

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      Scott Stringer Stops Short of Conceding, Acknowledges Race Appears Lost

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      Scott M. Stringer, addressing supporters at a results-watching party on the Upper West Side shortly after polls closed, appeared to acknowledge on Tuesday that his longstanding dream of becoming mayor had come up short, without explicitly conceding that the race was over.Citing his long career in government and politics, Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, gave what amounted to a valedictory to a campaign that he began as a leading contender, only to fade after two women leveled decades-old accusations of sexual harassment against him.“This was a very tough election for me and my family,” said Mr. Stringer, with his wife, Elyse Buxbaum, at his side “but it was a very inspirational one as well.”He pledged to support “the next mayor,” and he also made it clear he was not finished with public service.“I want to tell all of you that I’m not going anywhere,” he said to cheers and applause.Earlier, before Mr. Stringer spoke, his supporters had remained optimistic that a late surge would push him to victory.“I see the numbers. I see the statistics, and they don’t seem to favor him,” said Hamid Kherief of Manhattan, who was taking a smoking break outside The Ribbon, the restaurant where the watch party was held. “But I think we do rely on the last push.”Mr. Kherief, 65, of the Algerian-American Association in New York, said he liked Mr. Stringer for his deep ties to city government and “the establishment.” He acknowledged that Mr. Stringer’s campaign had been hurt by the sexual harassment accusations, which the candidate denied. More

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      Here Are the Democrats Running for Manhattan D.A.

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      Eight candidates are vying to take over the country’s largest local prosecutor’s office. The winner will inherit a potential Trump investigation.Eight Democrats are running to replace Cyrus Vance Jr. as Manhattan district attorney, jockeying to lead one of the most well-known and influential local prosecutor’s offices in the country at a time when views of the criminal justice system have shifted. The office is home to many high-profile investigations, including the ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.The contenders — five of whom have been prosecutors before and three of whom have not — mostly agree on a basic tenet: The office needs to change. But they are divided over just how far they would push reform efforts. Polling in the race has been sparse, but a recent survey found that the fund-raising leaders, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Alvin Bragg, are tied with the most support. Because the district attorney is a state election rather than a municipal one, voting will not be ranked choice, as it is in the citywide elections, and voters will select only one candidate.Here’s a list of the candidates with details on their vision for the office.Tahanie Aboushi, 35HarlemKisha BariMs. Aboushi’s candidacy is informed by her experience as a young teenager seeing her father convicted on federal conspiracy charges and sentenced to prison for more than two decades. As a result of that ordeal and its effect on her family, Ms. Aboushi says she has insight into the perspective of those who are and will be prosecuted by the office she hopes to lead, a striking approach in a prosecutorial race. In a race filled with calls for reform, Ms. Aboushi is the candidate most consistently focused on the system itself and on making it less punitive. She has pledged to cut the office by at least half, and she has stressed the need for alternatives to incarceration wherever possible. Alvin Bragg, 47HarlemMr. Bragg, a lifelong resident of Harlem, has called for a balanced approach between civil rights and public safety. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he peppers his public appearances with stories about his personal life, frequently focusing on his and his family’s fraught encounters with the criminal justice system.He said he first thought about being a prosecutor while clerking for a federal judge and seeing the way prosecutors could protect the public through major investigations. After serving as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Bragg became a federal prosecutor, focusing on issues like police misconduct and public corruption. He led a unit in the New York attorney general’s office that investigated police killings of unarmed civilians, and later became a chief deputy state attorney general.Liz Crotty, 50Union SquareLiz Crotty for Manhattan District Attorney“I bring a breath of reality to the race,” Ms. Crotty said in an interview. The longtime resident of Lower Manhattan is the most traditional candidate in the race, more focused on public safety than on reform. That puts her out of step with most of her colleagues, who have campaigned in large part on the racial biases in the criminal justice system. While she acknowledges that such biases exist, Ms. Crotty has said that rather than directing the office to stop prosecuting entire categories of crime, she would assess matters on a case-by-case basis. She has been endorsed by multiple police unions.Ms. Crotty, who worked in the Manhattan district attorney’s office under Mr. Vance’s predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, has also pledged to strengthen the office’s investigations of white-collar crime.Tali Farhadian Weinstein, 45Upper East SideTali Farhadian Weinstein for Manhattan District AttorneyA Rhodes scholar, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has a sterling résumé, having clerked for Merrick B. Garland (now the U.S. attorney general) and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She was also a lawyer for Eric Holder, when he was U.S. attorney general, and she later worked as a federal prosecutor.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised more money than any of her competitors, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign. Early in the race, she frequently spoke about reform. But in recent months, she has been more direct in describing her plans for prosecution and has placed more emphasis on public safety. She said in an interview that there was one question that prosecutors should always ask themselves: “Is my intervention as an actor in the criminal justice system increasing public safety or not?”Diana Florence, 50Kips BayDiana Florence for Manhattan DAMs. Florence, a veteran of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where she worked for 25 years, has spent much of her career prosecuting fraud and corruption cases. As the head of Mr. Vance’s Construction Fraud Task Force, she led cases involving worker deaths and wage theft. She has significant labor backing, with the endorsement of 20 unions.There is a shadow over Ms. Florence’s campaign. In 2020, she resigned from the office after a judge found that she had withheld evidence from defense lawyers in a major bribery case, which constitutes an ethics violation. A spokeswoman for Ms. Florence’s campaign has said the candidate has taken “full responsibility” for the mistake.Lucy Lang, 40HarlemNate BurdineMs. Lang, another veteran of Mr. Vance’s office, is the most policy-forward candidate in the race. She has released the outlines of her approach to dozens of issues, including hate crimes, police accountability and tenants’ rights. She has also emphasized her prosecutorial experience, including her investigation of a drug ring in East Harlem.A granddaughter of the philanthropist Eugene Lang, Ms. Lang became the director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College in 2018. In her view, prosecution should take a holistic view of the communities affected by crime: In East Harlem, for instance, she worked with a coalition of different groups — including the police and tenants — to revitalize the area and make it more welcoming to children.Eliza Orlins, 38ChelseaJuan Patino PhotographyThe views of Ms. Orlins (a two-time contestant on “Survivor”) were shaped by her decade working as a public defender. She sees the criminal justice system as racist, cruel and unjust, with outcomes that favor the rich and powerful, and has said she would work to “dismantle” it. She has pledged to cut the office in half, and to re-interview everyone working as a prosecutor there to ensure that their views align with her own.Ms. Orlins has said she would stop the prosecution of all but a handful of misdemeanors and redirect the office’s attention toward white-collar crime. She has also been politically outspoken on Twitter, speaking publicly against powerful figures like Mr. Trump and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.Dan Quart, 49Upper East SideDan Quart for Manhattan DAMr. Quart, a longtime state assemblyman, is the only candidate in the race with political experience. He has cited his record pushing for police accountability in the Legislature as evidence that he will be an effective reformer. “There’s no guesswork with me,” he said in an interview. “My 10 years in the Legislature should demonstrate to anyone who really wants reform in this office that I’ll be committed to it.”Though his progressive views are similar to those of Ms. Aboushi and Ms. Orlins, he has billed himself as the most pragmatic candidate on the race’s reformist wing. For instance, he has not pledged to cut the size of the office in half because, he said, it would be an unrealistic promise given the realities of the budget process. More

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      Farhadian Weinstein Is a Lightning Rod in Manhattan D.A. Race’s Lone Debate

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      Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who, along with Alvin Bragg, appears to be leading the Democratic field, was attacked over her finances and ads.One went to Yale, the other to Harvard. One was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, the other in Manhattan. One would be the first woman to lead the Manhattan district attorney’s office, the other, the first Black person.The two leading Democratic candidates for Manhattan district attorney, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Alvin Bragg, have similar pedigrees, and one recent poll showed them effectively tied as the primary nears its conclusion on June 22.But Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has given her campaign $8.2 million in recent weeks, multiplying her lead in a fund-raising battle she was already dominating and drawing the ire of rivals who say she is trying to buy the election. She has spent some of the money on televised attacks that other candidates, including several who were not directly targeted, have said are inappropriate.The vitriol was on full display Thursday at the only in-person debate of the primary, as the eight candidates in the race lobbed attacks at one another while focusing much of their energy on Ms. Farhadian Weinstein.One of her opponents, Dan Quart, warned the audience against being deceived by her polish. “Ms. Weinstein’s measured tone should not conceal the true viciousness and lack of truthfulness in her attack,” Mr. Quart said at the debate, referring to an ad and a mailing that he called “disgraceful.” Although there will be a Republican candidate on the ballot in November, whoever wins the primary is almost assured of victory given Manhattan’s overwhelmingly liberal electorate. He or she will take over an office that tries tens of thousands of cases a year and handles some of the most significant investigations in the United States, including a pending inquiry into President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who has been endorsed by Hillary Clinton and Eric H. Holder Jr., the former U.S. attorney general, has long been considered a leader in the race, thanks in part to the more than $4.5 million she has raised from other donors, many of them linked to Wall Street. She has offered a more moderate agenda than most of her competitors, emphasizing the importance of public safety and focusing on hate crimes, sex crimes and domestic violence. But she has been put on the defensive in the race’s final days, after ProPublica reported that she had paid little in federal income tax in four of the six most recent years. She has also faced criticism over both a mailing and television advertisement in which she targeted Mr. Bragg and Mr. Quart in ways that they said were racist and preyed on voters’ fears. At the debate, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s rivals challenged her on both the tax issue and the ad starting in the opening minutes. Alvin Bragg, a leading candidate in the Democratic primary, would be the first Black person to oversee the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIn the TV ad, an anonymous woman who identifies herself as a survivor of domestic abuse says that Mr. Bragg and Mr. Quart “would put women and families at risk of further abuse.” The ad and the mailing use stark imagery to suggest Mr. Bragg is a threat to women, a longstanding racist trope about Black men. (The ad and mailing also cast Mr. Quart in a sinister light.) “Two million dollars she put in to besmirch my reputation, and Alvin’s as well,” Mr. Quart said.Mr. Bragg said Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s material had racist overtones in the country’s worst traditions.In response, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein said her criticisms of her two opponents were substantive. She said the same thing in an interview earlier in the day, adding that she did not think the ad was racist.“I put a spotlight on the blind spots of the two men in the race when it comes to violence against women,” she said in the interview.Asked about arguments that she is trying to buy the race, she said, “I’m trying to get my message out.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s mailing highlighted incidents after episodes in which both parties file complaints against each other. She and others argue that when prosecutors dismiss such complaints without an investigation, even when both parties agree to the dismissal, it can remain unclear who was the true victim of the violence, and cycles of abuse can continue unchecked.Other candidates, including Mr. Quart, argue that when such complaints are left to linger even when both parties agree they should be dismissed, the legal system prolongs government intervention in potentially harmful ways for those who are trying to move on with their lives.Mr. Bragg, a former deputy attorney general in New York, has sought to find a balance in his campaign between emphasizing public safety and civil rights. He said in an interview on Wednesday that the ad and mailing were a response to the momentum of his campaign.“And it’s the worst kind of response,” he said. “The kind of response that is repugnant, abhorrent and has no place in politics and certainly not the Manhattan district attorney’s race.”Another candidate, Liz Crotty, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who has been endorsed by several police unions, criticized Ms. Farhadian Weinstein sharply in the debate and in an interview beforehand.“It maligns the fathers of two young women” — Mr. Bragg and Mr. Quart — “accusing them of being friendly to rapists,” Ms. Crotty said of the mailing at the debate. “This is not what the district attorney’s office is about.” Lucy Lang, another former prosecutor who has trailed only Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and Mr. Bragg in fund-raising and polls, said she agreed with some of the substantive points that Ms. Farhadian Weinstein had made but thought the way the message was delivered was inappropriate.“I think that the way she is conducting her campaign proves that she doesn’t have the values that we need at the district attorney’s office,” Ms. Lang said.Mr. Bragg also took issue with a quotation used in the ad and mailing that says he would be “unfair to rape victims,” which comes from The New York Daily News’s endorsement of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein. The passage in question refers to Mr. Bragg’s intention to reopen cases handled by Linda Fairstein, the lead prosecutor in the Central Park Five case. His supporters say the position is consistent with his pursuit of justice for the wrongfully accused.Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project who has endorsed Mr. Bragg, said Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s criticism of her competitor on the issue was puzzling, given that she has also stressed the need to overturn wrongful convictions. But Roberta A. Kaplan, a founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund and a supporter of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, said Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s agenda on sex crimes could be trusted in part because she is a woman.“I hate to play the gender card but here I think it is important to play the gender card,” Ms. Kaplan said. “There is a greater chance that those reforms will succeed if they are being implemented and run by a woman.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein was also endorsed by The New York Post; Mr. Bragg was endorsed by The New York Times’s editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom.Along with Ms. Crotty, Ms. Lang, and another former prosecutor, Diana Florence, three candidates with no prosecutorial experience — Mr. Quart, Tahanie Aboushi and Eliza Orlins — are competing for voters’ support.The knottiness and specificity of the debate on domestic violence is typical of the race, in which there are strong disagreements between the eight Democratic candidates even as most say they would make significant changes at the district attorney’s office.In the early months of this year, the candidates for the most part focused on those changes, offering policies that they said would make the office less racist and more just, and criticizing the tenure of the current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who announced in March that he would not seek re-election.But as gun violence in New York City rose and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein emerged as a leader in the race, conversation at candidate forums and on the campaign trail has focused on public safety, and on everything that other candidates and their surrogates say is troubling about her campaign. More