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      Trump-Era Special Counsel Secures Indictment of Lawyer for Firm With Democratic Ties

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      The defendant, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — The special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation obtained a grand jury indictment on Thursday of a prominent cybersecurity lawyer, accusing him of lying to the F.B.I. five years ago during a meeting about Donald J. Trump and Russia.The indictment secured by the special counsel, John H. Durham, also made public his findings about an episode in which cybersecurity researchers identified unusual internet data in 2016 that they said suggested the possibility of a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.He concluded that the Clinton campaign covertly helped push those suspicions to the F.B.I. and reporters, the indictment shows. The F.B.I. looked into the questions about Alfa Bank but dismissed them as unfounded, and the special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.The charging of the lawyer, Michael A. Sussmann, had been expected. He is accused of falsely telling a top F.B.I. lawyer that he was not representing any client at the meeting about those suspicions. Prosecutors contend that he was instead representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign.“Sussmann’s false statement misled the F.B.I. general counsel and other F.B.I. personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the F.B.I. of information that might have permitted it more fully to assess and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients,” the indictment said.Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, have denied the accusation, insisting that he did not say he had no client and maintaining that the evidence against him is weak. They also denied that the question of who Mr. Sussmann was working for was material, saying the FB.I. would have investigated the matter regardless.“Michael Sussmann was indicted today because of politics, not facts,” they said on Thursday. “The special counsel appears to be using this indictment to advance a conspiracy theory he has chosen not to actually charge. This case represents the opposite of everything the Department of Justice is supposed to stand for. Mr. Sussmann will fight this baseless and politically inspired prosecution.”A former computer crimes prosecutor who worked for the Justice Department for 12 years, Mr. Sussmann in 2016 represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s hacking of its servers.He has been a cybersecurity lawyer for 16 years at the law firm Perkins Coie, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party. A colleague of Mr. Sussmann’s, Marc Elias, was the general counsel to the Clinton campaign. He left the law firm last month.The firm said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Sussmann had also departed: “In light of the special counsel’s action today, Michael Sussmann, who has been on leave from the firm, offered his resignation from the firm in order to focus on his legal defense, and the firm accepted it.”The charge against him centers on a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting with the F.B.I. lawyer, James A. Baker, in which Mr. Sussmann relayed concerns about the odd internet data. Cybersecurity researchers had said it might be evidence of clandestine communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Russia’s Alfa Bank.The case against Mr. Sussmann turns on Mr. Baker’s recollection that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not at the meeting on behalf of any client — which Mr. Sussmann denies saying. There were no witnesses to their conversation.The indictment says Mr. Baker later briefed another F.B.I. official — apparently Bill Priestap, the bureau’s top counterintelligence official — about the meeting, and that Mr. Priestap’s notes say Mr. Baker recounted that Mr. Sussmann said he was “not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)In 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified under oath to Congress that he was representing the unnamed technology executive, and his legal team agrees that executive was his client at the meeting — but the only one.Internal law firm billing records, however, show that Mr. Sussmann had been logging his time on Alfa Bank matters to the Clinton campaign, the indictment says, contending that the campaign was his client, too. Those records are said to also show that Mr. Sussmann met or spoke with Mr. Elias about Alfa Bank repeatedly.Seeking to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers had argued to the Justice Department that the billing records were misleading and that he was not at the meeting at the direction or on behalf of the Clinton campaign, according to people familiar with the case. They also denied that the records could be fairly interpreted as showing that he billed the meeting with Mr. Baker to the campaign, as the indictment accuses him.Mr. Durham is known to have been closely scrutinizing the Alfa Bank episode since last fall, including using a grand jury to subpoena documents and question witnesses in ways that suggested he was pursuing a theory that the data had been manipulated or the analysis of it knowingly torqued.The 27-page indictment disclosed much of what he found, including quoting extensively from internal communications of unnamed researchers.The unidentified technology executive whom Mr. Sussmann represented was not the first researcher to scrutinize the data. But his company had access to large amounts of internet data, and he came to play an important role in driving the research and analysis, which he told Mr. Sussmann about around July 2016, the indictment said.In August of that year, the technology executive outlined to other researchers the goal of the effort, saying that unspecified “VIPs” wanted to find “true” information that would merit closer scrutiny. Noting that Mr. Trump had claimed he had no interactions with Russian financial institutions, the executive wrote that data suggesting that was false “would be jackpot” and would “give the base of a very useful narrative.”The executive also wrote: “Being able to provide evidence of *anything* that shows an attempt to behave badly in relation to this, the VIPs would be happy. They’re looking for a true story that could be used as the basis for closer examination.”But one of the researchers working on the project worried that their analysis had weaknesses and that suggested they all shared anti-Trump sentiment.“The only thing that drive[s] us at this point is that we just do not like” Trump, the indictment quoted one unnamed researcher as writing. “This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”In early September, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann met with a New York Times reporter who would later draft a story about Alfa Bank, and also began work on a so-called white paper that would summarize and explain the researchers’ data and analysis, billing the time to the Clinton campaign.On Sept. 12, the indictment said, Mr. Sussmann called Mr. Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, and spoke about his “efforts to communicate” with the Times reporter about the Alfa Bank allegations. Both billed the call to the campaign. And three days later, Mr. Elias exchanged emails with top campaign officials about the matter.In the meantime, on Sept. 14, five days before Mr. Sussmann met with the F.B.I., the technology executive emailed three researchers helping him with data. The executive sought to ensure the analysis they were assembling would strike security experts as simply “plausible,” even if it fell short of demonstrably true, prosecutors said.Mr. Sussmann also continued to push the Alfa Bank story to reporters. A month before the election, as Times editors were weighing whether to publish an article the reporter had drafted, Mr. Sussmann told him he should show the editors an opinion essay saying the paper’s investigative reporters had not published as many stories regarding Mr. Trump as other media outlets, the indictment said.Michael E. Sussmann, a lawyer from the firm Perkins Coie, during a cybersecurity conference in 2016.via C-SPANAttorney General William P. Barr appointed Mr. Durham in May 2019 to scour the Russia investigation for any wrongdoing. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr stoked expectations among Mr. Trump’s supporters that the prosecutors would uncover grave offenses by high-level government officials and support claims that the Russia investigation was a plot concocted by the so-called deep state to sabotage Mr. Trump.To date, Mr. Durham’s investigation has fallen short of those expectations. Out of office, Mr. Trump has repeatedly issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?”The current attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said at his confirmation hearing in February that he would let Mr. Durham continue to work and told Congress in July that he agreed with Mr. Barr’s earlier direction that Mr. Durham should eventually submit a report in a form that could be made public.Funding for most Justice Department operations, like much of the federal government, is controlled by an annual budget that covers a fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Spokesmen for Mr. Garland and Mr. Durham have declined to answer questions about whether Mr. Durham’s office has funding approval to continue operating beyond this month.But in announcing the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, the Justice Department said, “The special counsel’s investigation is ongoing.” More

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      Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties

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      The lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is accused of lying to the F.B.I. in a 2016 meeting about Trump and Russia. He denies wrongdoing.WASHINGTON — John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.Any indictment of the lawyer — Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russia’s 2016 hacking of its servers — is likely to attract significant political attention.Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie — whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmann’s, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign — of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia.The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter — though not the meeting with Mr. Baker — he billed the time to Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Another partner at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, was then serving as the general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Elias, who did not respond to inquiries, left Perkins Coie last month.In their attempt to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers are said to have insisted that their client was representing the cybersecurity expert he mentioned to Congress and was not there on behalf of or at the direction of the Clinton campaign.They are also said to have argued that the billing records are misleading because Mr. Sussmann was not charging his client for work on the Alfa Bank matter, but needed to show internally that he was working on something. He was discussing the matter with Mr. Elias and the campaign paid a flat monthly retainer to the firm, so Mr. Sussmann’s hours did not result in any additional charges, they said.Last October, as Mr. Durham zeroed in the Alfa Bank matter, the researcher who brought those concerns to Mr. Sussmann hired a new lawyer, Steven A. Tyrrell.Speaking on the condition that The New York Times not name his client in this article, citing a fear of harassment, Mr. Tyrrell said his client thought Mr. Sussmann was representing him at the meeting with Mr. Baker.“My client is an apolitical cybersecurity expert with a history of public service who felt duty bound to share with law enforcement sensitive information provided to him by D.N.S. experts,” Mr. Tyrrell said, referring to “Domain Name System,” a part of how the internet works and which generated the data that was the basis of the Alfa Bank concerns.Mr. Tyrrell added: “He sought legal advice from Michael Sussmann who had advised him on unrelated matters in the past and Mr. Sussmann shared that information with the F.B.I. on his behalf. He did not know Mr. Sussmann’s law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign and was simply doing the right thing.”Supporters of Mr. Trump have long been suspicious of Perkins Coie. On behalf of Democrats, Mr. Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to look into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia. That resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The F.B.I. cited some information from the dossier in botched wiretap applications.Some of the questions that Mr. Durham’s team has been asking in recent months — including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions — suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.Mr. Durham has also apparently weighed bringing some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. Outside lawyers for the firm recently met with the special counsel’s team and went over the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing that it was insufficient for any legal sanction.The lawyers for Perkins Coie and the firm’s managing partner did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.Mr. Sussmann, 57, grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University and then Brooklyn Law School. He spent 12 years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department, where he came to specialize in computer crimes. He has since worked for Perkins Coie for about 16 years and is a partner in its privacy and cybersecurity practice. Mr. Sussmann and his firm have been particular targets for Mr. Trump and his supporters.In October 2018, a Wall Street Journal columnist attacked Mr. Sussmann, calling him the “point man for the firm’s D.N.C. and Clinton campaign accounts,” apparently conflating him with Mr. Elias. Perkins Coie responded with a letter to the editor saying that was not Mr. Sussmann’s role and that the unnamed client on whose behalf he spoke to the F.B.I. had “no connections to either the Clinton campaign, the D.N.C. or any other political law group client.”Four months later, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Sussmann by name in a slightly garbled pair of Twitter posts, trying to tie him to the Clinton campaign and to the Steele dossier.Raising the specter of politicization in the Durham inquiry, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann are said to have argued to the Justice Department that Mr. Baker’s recollection was wrong, immaterial and too weak a basis for a false-statements charge. There were no other witnesses to the conversation, the people familiar with the matter said.In a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client,” but also said Mr. Sussmann had told him “he had cyberexperts that had obtained some information that they thought should get into the hands of the F.B.I.”However, Mr. Durham’s team is said to have found handwritten notes made by another senior F.B.I. official at the time, whom Mr. Baker briefed about the conversation with Mr. Sussmann, that support the notion that Mr. Sussmann said he was not there on behalf of a client. It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at trial under the so-called hearsay rule.A lawyer for Mr. Baker declined to comment.Mr. Durham has been under pressure to deliver some results from his long-running investigation, which began when then-Attorney General William P. Barr assigned him in 2019 to investigate the Russia inquiry. Out of office and exiled from Twitter, Mr. Trump has issued statements fuming, “Where’s Durham?” More

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      Scottish Group Seeks Source of Trump’s Funds for Golf Courses

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      The Trump Company invested hundreds of millions in the properties during a time when the former president was reporting heavy losses on his income tax returns.LONDON — A Scottish judge on Wednesday opened a path to a possible investigation into the purchase of Donald Trump’s two golf courses in Scotland, in a ruling that could force the former president to explain how he funded the deals.The Scottish government had resisted pressure to demand financial details from Mr. Trump through an “unexplained wealth order,” a powerful legal instrument usually deployed against leading figures in organized crime or drug trafficking.But on Wednesday a judge ruled that Avaaz, an online campaign group, should be given the right to challenge the government’s rejection of calls for such a move.Nicknamed “McMafia orders,” unexplained wealth orders were introduced in 2018 to strengthen the government’s armory against organized crime. Those subject to them can ultimately be forced to forfeit their assets if they are unable to explain satisfactorily how they were purchased.Though it remains far from clear that such an investigation will ever arise in this case, Wednesday’s court decision is nonetheless a setback for Mr. Trump, whose financial and tax dealings are under investigation in the United States.“This was a hurdle we had to jump, and we can now proceed to the substance,” said Nick Flynn, legal director of Avaaz, welcoming the ruling.“If you don’t think there is reasonable suspicion over these purchases then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention,” he added. “It’s the collective responsibility of Scottish ministers to act on this.”Mr. Trump bought a golf course near Aberdeen in 2006. But campaigners have focused more of their questions on the purchase of the larger and more prestigious Turnberry property for $60 million in 2014 — a time when he was reporting substantial losses on his income tax returns. Despite the Trump Organization’s investment of nearly $300 million, none of the Scottish properties have turned a profit.Though Eric Trump once said that most of the company’s financing came from Russia in those years, he has since said that the golf course investments were financed with company funds. Mr. Trump himself has denied that the money came from Russia.On Wednesday, Sarah Malone, executive vice president of Trump International Scotland, described the push to investigate the funding of the organization’s golf courses as “political game-playing at its worst and a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money which further damages Scotland’s reputation as a serious country to invest in and do business.”“We have developed and operate two globally acclaimed, multi-award winning visitor destinations in Scotland and make a significant contribution to the Scottish leisure and tourism economy. This latest attempt to undermine that investment is an utter disgrace,” Ms. Malone said in a statement.Scottish ministers initially rejected the idea of issuing an unexplained wealth order, and there was a dispute over whose responsibility it would be to authorize such an investigation. In February, Scotland’s Parliament voted against a motion, brought by the Scottish Green Party, that would have pressed for more details on the source of the Trump Organization’s money.But on Wednesday in the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, the judge, Lord Sandison, sided with Avaaz, saying that its legal claim “had real prospects of success” and there was “a sensible legal argument to be had on the matters raised by the petition.” He also rejected Scottish government arguments that the petition had been filed too late to proceed.The decision was welcomed by the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, who said in a statement that he was “glad we are a step forward in getting some clarity over why Trump’s business dealings in Scotland haven’t been investigated. It should never have got to the stage of a legal challenge from a nongovernmental organization for the Scottish government to confirm or deny whether they will seek a ‘McMafia order.’”In a statement, the Scottish government said that “it would be inappropriate for us to comment on an ongoing legal action.” 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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      Legal Threats Hover Over Trump as He Hints at a 2024 Bid

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      As the former president weighs another run for the White House, he’s confronting various investigations and lawsuits. Here’s a rundown.Donald Trump hit the campaign trail again last weekend, and he certainly seemed happy to be back in the spotlight. He bashed President Biden and undocumented immigrants, repeated his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, and hinted at a possible run for the presidency again in 2024.But as he contemplates a return to politics, he has a more immediate question to contend with: Will he be able to stay out of legal trouble?On Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the former president’s real estate company, the Trump Organization, with running a 15-year scheme to help executives avoid taxation. A top Trump executive, Allen Weisselberg, was accused of dodging taxes on $1.7 million in income; he surrendered to the D.A.’s office on Thursday morning.Mr. Weisselberg’s was the first indictment to come out of a lengthy investigation that is being conducted by that office, and it could signal a turning point. If he agrees to testify against the former president, Mr. Weisselberg would be a powerful witness: He has long been one of Mr. Trump’s closest financial advisers, and Mr. Trump once praised him for his willingness to do “whatever was necessary to protect the bottom line.”After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump was impeached for a second time — something that hadn’t happened to any previous U.S. president. If he were to be indicted on a criminal charge, that too would be a first for a former president.Ed Rollins, the chairman of the Great America PAC, which backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns but has not pledged to support him in 2024, said that Mr. Trump remained the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination. Still, he said in an interview, the threat of criminal prosecution “certainly makes it more difficult” for Mr. Trump to claim the party’s mantle.“You have to be adding people, adding players, convincing people that, ‘My loss was detrimental to the country,’” Mr. Rollins added. “People are going to be saying: ‘Tell me why I should go back to you. Why should I put money into your campaign?’”And the Manhattan D.A.’s investigation is only one of a smattering of legal obstacles that Mr. Trump may need to overcome, as he considers a possible return. Here’s a look at the many investigations and lawsuits that he’s currently fighting — touching on his business dealings, accusations of misconduct toward women, and his role in drumming up the Capitol riot.Taxes and financial affairsMr. Weisselberg was indicted as part of a long-running investigation by Cyrus Vance, the district attorney for Manhattan. At Mr. Weisselberg’s arraignment on Thursday afternoon, prosecutors described a 15-year tax fraud scheme and leveled 15 felony counts against him, the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation.Mr. Vance has assembled a grand jury and is in the process of determining whether to bring charges against Mr. Trump; the body has already questioned a number of the former president’s associates. Prosecutors have seized Mr. Weisselberg’s personal tax and financial records, as well as those of his daughter-in-law.Letitia James, the New York attorney general, also opened a parallel investigation into whether the Trump Organization had manipulated property values to avoid taxes and gain other financial benefits. In May, Ms. James’s office announced that its investigation, which began as a civil concern, had expanded into the criminal realm and would join Mr. Vance’s inquiry.The former president’s niece, the psychiatrist and author Mary Trump, has also sued him for fraud. Last year, she filed a suit claiming that Mr. Trump had defrauded her out of tens of millions of dollars. She had claimed that when her father, Fred Trump Jr., died, she was prevented from accessing her stake in his will, and that her share was slowly depleted by Donald Trump and other family members. After Fred Trump Sr. died, the remaining Trump siblings sought to exclude Mary from the family holdings entirely, she said.She accepted a settlement in 2001, but after a 2018 Times investigation drew back the curtain on the family’s finances, she filed a lawsuit accusing her uncle and his siblings of fraud and breaching fiduciary trust. The suit is still pending.Defamation claimsThe most high-profile lawsuit against Donald Trump may be the one brought by E. Jean Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, whose 2019 book accuses him of raping her in the 1990s. After Mr. Trump publicly denied the allegation and said Ms. Carroll was “not my type,” she sued him for damaging her reputation and career.When Mr. Trump was still in office, the Justice Department sought to stanch the lawsuit by arguing that he was legally protected from defamation suits filed over things he said while executing his duties as president. A federal judge ruled against the administration, but the agency’s lawyers appealed.Under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, Biden’s Justice Department has continued the appeal, saying that Mr. Trump’s remarks should be protected under the Federal Tort Claims Act.Another woman, Summer Zervos, sued Mr. Trump in 2017, days before he took office, saying that he had damaged her reputation and her financial well-being when he denied her accusation of sexual assault. The dispute stems from her time as a contestant on “The Apprentice,” when she claims he groped and kissed her against her will.Because he made the statement in question before becoming president, Mr. Trump’s remarks aren’t protected under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The suit is currently before the New York Court of Appeals.His actions on Jan. 6Members of Congress and Capitol Police officers have filed separate suits seeking to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his role in organizing and riling up the rioters who stormed the government building on Jan. 6.Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Eric Swalwell of California, both Democrats, have both filed suits arguing that Mr. Trump violated the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law that makes it a crime for people to conspire to prevent elected officials from discharging their duties.In a different suit, a pair of Capitol Police officers who were injured on Jan. 6 are seeking damages from Mr. Trump for his part in the events of that day. The officers, James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, say in the suit that they were hit with bear spray, assaulted with flagpoles and crushed against a door by the attackers as they tried to fight them back.The attorney general of Washington, D.C., Karl Racine, has also opened an investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s incendiary language rose to the level of criminal incitement.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Trump Sues N.Y.C. for Ending Golf Course Contract After Capitol Riot

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      The Trump Organization, which had a 20-year contract to operate a public golf course in the Bronx, claims it was unfairly targeted.The Trump Organization sued New York City on Monday, saying the city had wrongly terminated a lucrative golf course contract for political reasons after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in Washington.The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on the eve of the mayoral election, argued that the January decision by Mayor Bill de Blasio to end the company’s 20-year contract to run the public golf course in the Bronx had no legitimate legal basis and was meant only to punish former President Donald J. Trump.“Mayor de Blasio had a pre-existing, politically-based predisposition to terminate Trump-related contracts, and the city used the events of January 6, 2021 as a pretext to do so,” the suit said.In a statement, the company said that the course was “widely recognized as one of the most magnificent public golf experiences anywhere in the country.”A spokesman for the mayor, Bill Neidhardt, responded, saying: “Donald Trump directly incited a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. You do that, and you lose the privilege of doing business with the City of New York.”Mr. Trump was impeached this year for inciting the riot, his second impeachment, but was acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.After the attacks on the Capitol, the city abruptly ended several contracts with the Trump Organization, including agreements that allowed the company to operate the Central Park Carousel and two ice-skating rinks in the park.The move came as a wave of other businesses also backed away from Mr. Trump after the attacks on the Capitol, including the P.G.A. of America, which announced it would no longer hold one of its major tournaments at a New Jersey golf club owned by the president.The contracts in Central Park had already been set to expire in April. The lawsuit centers on a city-owned course in the Ferry Point section of the Bronx, called Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. The Trump Organization was in its sixth year of running the course, which opened in 2015.Overall, the contracts had garnered the Trump Organization about $17 million a year, Mr. de Blasio said in January.Although Mr. de Blasio said then that the decision to sever ties was made because Mr. Trump incited rioters at the Capitol, the city offered a more contractual basis for the decision: The Trump Organization had defaulted in its agreement on the golf course because it had not attracted a major tournament and was unlikely to do so in the future, given the P.G.A.’s decision.The mayor insisted at the time that the city was on “strong legal ground,” but the Trump Organization vowed to fight back, saying the move was a form of political discrimination.Mr. Trump had been hailed by city officials years ago for refurbishing Wollman Rink in Central Park. Travis Dove for The New York TimesNow, the organization has made its case in an 18-page petition saying that it was never obliged to attract an actual tournament but merely to maintain “a first class tournament quality daily fee golf course.” The petition included several statements from professional golfers, including Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, attesting to the course’s being “first class” and “tournament quality.”A spokesman for the city’s law department said that it would “vigorously defend” its decision to terminate the contract and that it “looked forward to selecting a new vendor for Ferry Point.”There is little love lost between Mr. Trump and Mr. de Blasio. The former president has called the Democratic mayor and 2020 presidential contender “the worst mayor in the history of New York City.” Mr. de Blasio, in turn, embraced Mr. Trump as a foil during his own ill-fated presidential run, even attempting to give the president a nickname, “Con Don.”The city initially celebrated its collaboration with Mr. Trump when the rising real estate developer first won the contract to refurbish Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. Mr. Trump’s company finished the project under budget and ahead of its deadline, and city officials embraced him; one even joked about planting a “Trump tree” in the park.“I’m not used to having nice things said about me,” Mr. Trump said at the time.The contracts were renewed during the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But Mr. de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, staked out a position against Mr. Trump, one that put him in line with his many liberal constituents.The lawsuit comes as Mr. Trump and his company are facing an unrelated criminal investigation from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining whether the former president and his employees committed financial fraud in recent years.Prosecutors appear to be in the final stages of investigating Allen H. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, and could criminally charge him this summer, The New York Times previously reported.Mr. Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family since 1973, was listed as the contact for the company on the city’s contract for the Central Park carousel.Ben Protess More

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      2 Leading Manhattan D.A. Candidates Face the Trump Question

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      Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein both had dealings with President Donald J. Trump’s administration that Mr. Trump could try to use against them.Whoever wins the race to become the next Manhattan district attorney will take over one of the most contentious, highest-profile criminal investigations in the office’s history: the inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his business.Two of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary field, Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein, have had past contacts with Mr. Trump’s administration — dealings that could become an issue if one of them becomes district attorney.Mr. Bragg, a former official with the New York attorney general’s office, reminds voters frequently that in his former job, he sued Mr. Trump’s administration “more than a hundred times.”Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who once served as general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, has been less vocal about Mr. Trump. She only occasionally notes her involvement in a successful lawsuit against the Trump administration. And she has not spoken publicly about once interviewing with Trump administration officials for a federal judgeship early in his term.Mr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein are among eight Democratic candidates vying to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney, who is not running for re-election. With the primary less than one month away, Mr. Trump continues to loom over the race.Mr. Vance’s office recently convened a grand jury that will hear evidence about Mr. Trump and his company, according to a person with knowledge of the matter — a sign that the investigation could soon intensify.Tali Farhadian Weinstein attended a meeting on White House grounds to discuss a federal judgeship.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesMr. Bragg and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein have raised more money than any of their opponents, and both say they have the prosecutorial experience to take over the office.But each would also bring particular experiences to the Trump investigation that the former president, based on his past actions, seems likely to weaponize against them: Mr. Bragg’s history of legal conflict with Mr. Trump and Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s previously undisclosed discussion of a judicial post with Trump administration lawyers.Andrew Weissmann, a former senior prosecutor under Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, said he expected Mr. Trump to target the next district attorney just as he had attacked Mr. Mueller, whom the former president had called a “true Never Trumper” and “totally conflicted.”“No matter who gets elected, he’s going to do opposition research, and assuming an indictment’s brought or anything close to that, he’s going to do what he did with the special counsel,” Mr. Weissmann said.The impaneling of a new grand jury, first reported by The Washington Post, follows years of investigation by Mr. Vance, who has focused on possible financial crimes at the Trump Organization, including tax and bank-related fraud.Prosecutors were already using grand juries to issue subpoenas, obtain documents and hear some testimony, but the new grand jury is expected to hear from a range of witnesses in the coming months. There is no indication that the investigation has reached an advanced stage or that prosecutors have decided to seek charges against Mr. Trump or his company.Mr. Trump’s advisers have said that he will try to impugn the motives of the prosecutors investigating him. After The Post’s report came out, Mr. Trump called the inquiry “purely political” and said that “our prosecutors are politicized.”That is an attack that he might wield against Mr. Bragg, who has repeatedly brought up his many lawsuits against Mr. Trump and his administration, referring to a period in 2017 to 2018 when he served as a senior official under successive New York attorneys general, Eric Schneiderman and Barbara D. Underwood.One of the most prominent of the office’s lawsuits, filed in June 2018, accused the Donald J. Trump Foundation and the Trump family of what Ms. Underwood called “a shocking pattern of illegality,” and ultimately led to the foundation’s dissolution.Alvin Bragg worked in the New York State attorney general’s office when suits against President Donald J. Trump were filed.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Bragg, at a Democratic candidate forum in December, cited that lawsuit as one reason he was qualified to oversee the district attorney’s Trump investigation.“I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation,” Mr. Bragg said. “I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.”Mr. Bragg acknowledged that Mr. Trump could seek to make an issue of his history if he wins. Asked how he would contend with accusations of bias from the former president, Mr. Bragg said he had been attentive to what he had said publicly — and what he had not said.“It is a fact that I have sued Trump more than a hundred times,” Mr. Bragg said. “I can’t change that fact, nor would I. That was important work. That’s separate from anything that the D.A.’s office may be looking at now.”A spokeswoman for Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, Jennifer Blatus, accused Mr. Bragg of attacking Mr. Trump “for political advantage every chance he gets,” in contrast to what Ms. Blatus characterized as her candidate’s “judicious approach.”In an emailed statement, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein explained her reluctance to speak about a potential attack on her by Mr. Trump.“I have repeatedly declined requests to discuss a hypothetical argument that a current subject of an investigation in the Manhattan D.A.’s office might make — that’s the only proper approach for open matters the next D.A. will inherit,” she said.She also criticized Mr. Bragg for hosting a fund-raiser with Daniel S. Goldman, a former House lawyer who worked on Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s meeting with Trump administration lawyers over the judgeship occurred in 2017, early in the Trump administration.A friend of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, the Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, suggested her as a candidate for a district court judgeship to Avi Berkowitz, then a special assistant to Jared Kushner, Mr. Feldman said. He did so on his own initiative, he said. (Two years later, in 2019, Mr. Feldman testified against Mr. Trump at his first impeachment hearing.)Ms. Farhadian Weinstein, who had previously applied for a judgeship during the administration of President Barack Obama, received a phone call from the Trump administration out of the blue, she told an associate. It is not unusual for lawyers with judicial aspirations to seek judgeships regardless of political party — Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has been registered as both an independent and a Democrat in recent years — and she took the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds.But the meeting, which included lawyers John Bash and Gregory G. Katsas from the White House Counsel’s Office, became heated during a disagreement over constitutional law, the associate said, and the conversation never went further.A former administration official who was familiar with the meeting did not remember its being characterized as heated and called it a “perfunctory” interview set up to appease the former president’s son-in-law.A person close to Mr. Kushner said that while Mr. Kushner would periodically pass along to the White House Counsel’s Office recommendations people would make for judges, he has no memory of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein being discussed. There is no evidence Mr. Trump personally knew of Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s interest in a judgeship or of her trip to meet with the White House lawyers.While Ms. Farhadian Weinstein’s interview for a judgeship in 2017 could become fodder for the former president’s political attacks should she become district attorney, legal experts said it raised no ethical concerns, nor would it require that she recuse herself from the office’s investigation into Mr. Trump and his organization.Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government advocacy group, said in an interview that while Ms. Farhadian Weinstein would not have been required to disclose the meeting publicly in the district attorney’s race, the information was “certainly relevant to the job she’s applying for.”“It’s information that voters will want to consider, and it’s up to them to decide how this factors into their ultimate choice,” Ms. Lerner said.William K. Rashbaum More

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

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