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    Trump Hush-Money Case Timeline: What Led to Indictment

    The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into Donald J. Trump’s hush-money payments to a pornographic film star, which led to the indictment of the former president, has spanned nearly five years.Here are some key moments:Aug. 21, 2018Michael D. Cohen says he arranged hush-money payments for the president, and the investigation begins.Mr. Cohen, previously a personal lawyer and fixer for Mr. Trump, pleaded guilty to federal crimes and told a court that Mr. Trump had directed him to arrange hush-money payments to two women. The payments were made during the 2016 campaign to keep the women from speaking publicly about affairs they said they had conducted with Mr. Trump.Soon after Mr. Cohen’s admission, the Manhattan district attorney’s office opened an investigation to examine if the payments broke New York State laws. The office soon paused the inquiry at the request of federal prosecutors, who were still looking into the same conduct.August 2019The district attorney’s office subpoenas the Trump Organization.After federal prosecutors said that they had “effectively concluded” their investigation, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney at the time, revived his own inquiry. Late in the month, prosecutors in his office issued a subpoena to the Trump Organization and another subpoena to Mr. Trump’s accounting firm, demanding eight years of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns.Sept. 19, 2019Mr. Trump’s lawyers sue to protect his tax returns.The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, argued that a sitting president cannot be criminally investigated. It led to a lengthy delay.July 9, 2020Mr. Vance wins his first key victory at the U.S. Supreme Court.After appellate judges ruled against Mr. Trump, the lawsuit found its way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled that the presidency did not shield Mr. Trump from criminal inquiries and that he had no absolute right to block the release of his tax returns.The ruling left Mr. Trump with the opportunity to raise different objections to Mr. Vance’s subpoena.AUTUMN 2020The investigation intensifies.Prosecutors interviewed employees of the main bank and insurance company that serve Mr. Trump and issued several new subpoenas.The district attorney’s office also signaled in another court filing that it had grounds to investigate the president for tax fraud.The investigation that led to the indictment of Donald J. Trump has spanned nearly five years.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFeb. 22, 2021The Supreme Court denies Mr. Trump’s final bid to block the release of his returns.The brief unsigned order was a decisive defeat for Mr. Trump and a turning point in Mr. Vance’s investigation.Just hours later, eight years of financial records were handed over to Mr. Vance’s office.March 1, 2021The investigation’s focus turns to a top executive.In the spring, Mr. Vance’s prosecutors set their sights on Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s long-serving chief financial officer, whom they hoped to pressure into cooperating with their investigation.The prosecutors were particularly interested in whether the Trump Organization handed out valuable benefits to Mr. Weisselberg as a form of untaxed compensation.July 1, 2021The Trump Organization is charged with running a 15-year tax scheme.When Mr. Weisselberg refused to testify against his boss, prosecutors announced charges against him and Mr. Trump’s company, saying that the company helped its executives evade taxes by compensating them with benefits such as free cars and apartments that were hidden from the authorities.JAN. 1, 2022A new Manhattan district attorney takes office.Mr. Vance left office, and his successor, Alvin L. Bragg, took over the case. Both are Democrats.Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, retained two of the investigation’s leaders, Mark F. Pomerantz, an experienced former federal prosecutor and white-collar defense lawyer, and Carey Dunne, Mr. Vance’s general counsel.Feb. 23, 2022Two prosecutors resign, leaving the investigation’s future in doubt.After Mr. Bragg expressed reservations about the case, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne suspended the presentation of evidence about Mr. Trump to a grand jury. A month later, they resigned, prompting a public uproar over Mr. Bragg’s decision not to proceed with an indictment.In his resignation letter, which was later obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Pomerantz said that Mr. Trump had been guilty of numerous felonies.Aug. 18, 2022Mr. Bragg’s investigation continues.After staying mostly silent through weeks of criticism, the district attorney publicly discussed his office’s investigation of Mr. Trump for the first time. His fundamental message: The inquiry would continue.Aug. 18, 2022Allen Weisselberg pleads guilty and agrees to testify against the Trump Organization.Though the chief financial officer declined to turn on Mr. Trump himself, he agreed to testify at the October trial against the company that he had served for nearly half a century.Late Summer, 2022The prosecutors turn back to hush money.After several months, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the long-running investigation’s original focus: a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic film actress who said she had a sexual relationship with Mr. Trump.Dec. 24, 2022The Trump Organization is convicted, securing a significant victory for the district attorney.Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors won a conviction of Mr. Trump’s family business, convincing a jury that the company was guilty of tax fraud and other crimes.January 2023The district attorney impanels a new grand jury.The grand jury met throughout the next three months and heard testimony about the hush-money payment from at least nine witnesses.Midwinter 2023Prosecutors signal that an indictment is likely, offering Mr. Trump a chance to testify before the grand jury.Such offers almost always indicate an indictment is close; it would be unusual to notify a potential defendant without ultimately seeking charges against him.March 18, 2023Mr. Trump predicts his arrest and calls for protests.Without any direct knowledge, the former president posted on his Truth Social account that he would be arrested three days later and sought to rally supporters to his side. His prediction was soon walked back, and he was not arrested at that time.March 30, 2023Mr. Trump is indicted by a grand jury.The charges, which are still unknown, will be the first against any president, current or former. More

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    How the Manhattan DA's Investigation Into Donald Trump Unraveled

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

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

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

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    Lucy Lang Sought Change at the Manhattan D.A.’s Office. Now She Wants to Lead It.

    Lucy Lang has spent most of her career as a criminal-justice reformer. But is she too close to the system to bring about real change?Lucy Lang is a squeaky wheel, a meddler, a self-described noodge.A granddaughter of the philanthropist Eugene Lang, she is bent on the constant improvement of her surroundings. In the dozen years she spent working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, she developed a reputation for pushing reforms that created new opportunities for those charged by prosecutors — but she was also stymied by a leadership team that did not always want things to change as fast as she did.Now Ms. Lang, 40, wants to be in charge of that change, running against seven other Democrats to replace her old boss, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., as the Manhattan district attorney. In April, she gave her own campaign half a million dollars, according to campaign finance reports, in hopes of staying competitive with two leading candidates, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Alvin Bragg. While little quality polling has come out in the race, the few available surveys have shown her trailing only Ms. Weinstein in popularity.But as a longtime employee in the district attorney’s office, she is also the candidate who has worked most closely with Mr. Vance, who has been something of a punching bag for the other contenders. They have criticized what they say is his relative slowness in making the criminal justice system less punitive for lower-income New Yorkers, while being too lenient on the wealthy and powerful.All of this sets up an apparent contradiction for Ms. Lang’s campaign: She cites her experience working in the office led by Mr. Vance, even as she insists that she is the right person to reform that office.Veterans of the office characterized Ms. Lang as someone skilled at bringing about meaningful reform from inside the system. Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance, said that while her old boss was more progressive than his critics say, Ms. Lang deserved praise for her sustained commitment to change, especially in seeking ways to reduce the reliance on jails and prisons.“She and a couple of other junior people took it upon themselves — and this is a highly unusual thing to do — they took it upon themselves to come to me and give me their ideas and thoughts and suggestions about how the office could be better,” Ms. Agnifilo said.But Ms. Lang’s opponents remain skeptical.“It’s not like she was an A.D.A. in this bureau or that bureau,” said Dan Quart, another candidate and a longtime state assemblyman who has been critical of Mr. Vance. “She was in the room when they made policy decisions.”Asked about her time at Mr. Vance’s office, Ms. Lang was diplomatic.“I could see that the world was changing and that the office wasn’t quite keeping pace,” she said. “Although there were respects in which there were great advances being made.”Ms. Lang, seen here greeting a voter in an apartment building, started at the district attorney’s office working under Robert Morgenthau.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesAn unusual curiosityThe oldest child of the actor Stephen Lang — perhaps best known for playing the vicious Col. Miles Quaritch in “Avatar” — and Kristina Watson, a painter, Ms. Lang was born in Manhattan and raised in the West Village and in Westchester.Early on she showed an unusual curiosity about other people. At her family’s annual Memorial Day picnic, she would go from blanket to blanket, asking strangers to share their food, then joining them to chat — an openness that friends say helps explain her later success at climbing the ladder at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Like her grandfather and her father, she went to Swarthmore, where she studied political and legal philosophy and served as captain of the lacrosse team. (“I’m not a good athlete,” she said, “but I just like being on a team.”) Then, inspired in part by her aunt, the lawyer and philanthropist Jane Lang, she enrolled at Columbia Law School.Two experiences during her student years drove Ms. Lang to become a prosecutor: In 2004 she worked for Judge Jed S. Rakoff as he presided over a death penalty case, and the following winter, a childhood friend of Ms. Lang’s was killed by the friend’s own brother. She said that seeing her friend’s family take on dual roles — relatives of both the victim and the defendant — gave her a sense of how both groups can be harmed by prosecutors.“I just saw it as a real opportunity for public servants to do things differently, to support people better,” she said.After graduating in 2006, she went to work for Robert Morgenthau, the venerable Manhattan district attorney, starting in the appeals division. Along the way she built a friendly relationship with Mr. Morgenthau; she later co-wrote one of his final opinion articles.By 2010, when Mr. Vance took over the office, she was working in the trial division. It was there that she first noticed a small problem: Doctors were reluctant to testify in criminal court, concerned that doing so could make them subject to civil liability. It was the sort of specific, concrete issue she loved to tackle. Working with an emergency room doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, Ms. Lang created a curriculum to teach doctors about criminal trials.Even as her cases became more intense — she started working murder trials in 2013 — Ms. Lang’s ambitions for improving the office became grander. After she won a wiretap case against 35 people for selling angel dust, heroin and cocaine, she successfully pitched the office’s leadership team on a program promoting alternatives to incarceration for young offenders. (It later became a unit that provides some defendants the chance to participate in community-based programs in lieu of prison.)By that time, Ms. Lang said, she was not nervous presenting to the office’s leaders; she knew them all.In January 2017, Ms. Agnifilo promoted Ms. Lang, giving her a special position leading policy at the office. That fall, Ms. Lang piloted the first version of what would become the Inside Criminal Justice initiative, a series of seminars that brought prosecutors and incarcerated people together to talk about the justice system and how to improve it.Jarrell Daniels, a participant in the initiative who had recently been released from prison, was so intrigued by the program that he asked to return to the facility to continue with it. He remembered sitting around a table in a cramped conference room, watching as the participants grilled Ms. Lang.“She’s either brave or she’s crazy, or she might be both,” he remembered thinking.“She sat there kind of poised as they gave it to her about the district attorney’s office and vented about their personal experiences with the justice system,” he said. “Although that wasn’t what she was there for, she kind of allowed them to share their piece.”‘What are we waiting for?’Ideas about the criminal justice system changed rapidly during Mr. Vance’s time in office.In 2010, he was seen as one of the more liberal district attorneys in the country. When he leaves office, at the end of this year, he will do so as a seeming moderate — not because he has necessarily changed, but because a wave of more recently elected prosecutors have moved aggressively to take on what they consider fundamental injustices in the system. (Mr. Vance’s defenders respond that he has cut prosecutions by nearly 60 percent and established one of the nation’s first conviction integrity programs, among other accomplishments.)More than a dozen of those recently elected prosecutors have endorsed Ms. Lang’s candidacy, including Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney in Baltimore. She said that Ms. Lang was one of the more prominent people behind the scenes in the progressive prosecutor movement, particularly through her work at the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, a role she took on in 2018 and left last year.Ms. Mosby said that Ms. Lang’s ideas tended to scramble the power dynamics of the system, bringing together prosecutors — those with the most power — and incarcerated people, who have the least.“Her having an understanding and appreciation for that was something I found rather compelling,” Ms. Mosby said. “Not a lot of prosecutors have that.”Ms. Lang insists that despite her years working within the legal establishment, she is no incrementalist — she argues that she has made “systemic” change. But opponents to her left, like Mr. Quart and another candidate, Tahanie Aboushi, have raised questions about whether she, or any experienced prosecutor, can be relied upon to uproot a system in which they thrived.“While I appreciate that Lucy is leaning into reform as much as a career prosecutor can, an entire career of inside-the-box thinking is going to get us minor refinements to what we already have,” said Ms. Aboushi’s campaign manager, Jamarah Hayner. “And that’s just not good enough.”Even Ms. Lang’s fans acknowledge that she was sometimes hampered by the inertia of the office bureaucracy. She is particularly closemouthed about her relationship with Mr. Vance — she declines to criticize him, but insists that had he decided to run for re-election, she would have run against him.Ms. Agnifilo said that while she knows Ms. Lang “respects” Mr. Vance, she understood why it was tricky for her, as a candidate, to be too associated with him, given some of the criticism he has faced. She added that when she and Ms. Lang would argue at work, it wasn’t about the direction that the office should head in, but the speed at which it should do it.“I appreciated the fact that some of these things were so important that she was like, ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s just do it,’” Ms. Agnifilo said. More

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

    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?

    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

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

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