Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is facing allegations of mishandling his role and duties from conservative organizations after the criminal conviction of former President Donald Trump in New York last month.
Nearly two weeks after a jury convicted Trump on 34 charges for falsifying business records in a case brought by Bragg, the Democratic district attorney, who campaigned on prosecuting Trump, is facing a host of complaints — including one from the Gun Owners of America, a pro-Second Amendment group accusing him of taking positions that stifle the free speech of pro-gun YouTubers. Bragg is separately accused of engaging in “racial and sex discrimination” through diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices, according to a complaint by America First Legal.
The recent complaints against Bragg aren’t all related to the historic conviction of Trump, the first former president to be found guilty in a felony case. However, they come as prominent conservative leaders such as Stephen Miller, former Trump White House adviser and AFL founder, have ramped up calls for Republicans to get “off the sidelines” and fight back using legal means.
“Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these communists,” Miller told Fox News just days after Trump’s conviction.
Miller’s group, in recent months, has seized on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action at colleges and has pushed to end similar practices in workplaces that offer DEI hiring policies. AFL last week announced its complaint over a section of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office website touting a DEI commitment to “build a diverse workforce,” arguing that the claim from the DA’s office is meant “to enforce its quota system and screen out white, male, or Asian candidates.” The group also alleged that “Bragg’s Office collects race, ethnicity, and even sexual orientation data on its employment applications.”
“You cannot discriminate on the basis of race or sex when you’re making hiring, firing, or other employment decisions,” Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of AFL, told the Washington Examiner, citing the district attorney’s DEI section of its webpage.
AFL’s complaint was filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a state law complaint was filed to the New York Department of Labor against Bragg’s alleged hiring practices.
“If you make hiring and firing decisions, if you consider race as a factor when you’re trying to hire an assistant district attorney, or when you’re doing whatever, that’s illegal, it’s been illegal since Title VII was enacted in 1964,” Hamilton added.
The focus on Bragg comes at a time when conservative firebrands have scolded the GOP majority in the House for not fighting back aggressively enough against Democrats such as Bragg for bringing the hush money indictment against Trump, among the three other criminal cases he faces. Former Trump adviser and War Room podcast host Steve Bannon, who is about to be sent to prison for defying a Democratic congressional subpoena, blasted House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) in April for being entirely “performative” when it comes to supporting Trump.
“The Justice Department, why have they not been sent letters — ‘Preserve your documents.’ Why have hearings not gone on? Why have they not broken these things up? You know why. Because they don’t really have Trump’s back,” Bannon said at the time.
Hamilton also stressed the need for further investigations into whether the Biden administration coordinated with Bragg at any point ahead of the April 2023 hush money indictment against Trump, pointing to former top Department of Justice official Matthew Colangelo’s departure from the DOJ in December 2022 to go work for Bragg. Last week, the Judiciary Committee led by Jordan grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland about Colangelo’s move to go work for Bragg.
“No one has ever left [the DOJ] to be a special adviser to the district attorney,” Hamilton stressed, adding “there’s a lot more to come” from AFL on that matter.
Meanwhile, the DOJ on Tuesday wrote a letter addressing claims that Colangelo joined Bragg’s team for the specific purpose of going after the former president, saying the department performed a “comprehensive search for email communications” from January 2021 through the day Trump was convicted among all employees who work in DOJ leadership, including political appointees of President Joe Biden.
“We found none. This is unsurprising,” the DOJ wrote to the House Judiciary Committee.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that Bragg and Colangelo plan to testify to the committee on July 12, one day after the upcoming sentencing hearing for Trump.
In addition to AFL’s post-guilty verdict targets on Bragg, the Gun Owners of America flagged in a press release last week that YouTube and parent company Google announced a major change to their policy on firearms-related content, set to take effect on June 18, which was inspired in part by Bragg’s communications to the Big Tech corporation’s senior leadership.
In April, Bragg sent a letter to YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, urging the company to alter its algorithms to stop promoting certain firearms content and to censor and remove specific firearms-related content directly.
Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for the Gun Owners of America, said it’s “no surprise that a political party that’s willing to do that is now also going after former presidents and trying to lock them up for misdemeanors and rely on sham trials, witch hunts, and misinformation to sort of destroy our nation.”
The 34 counts of business falsification against Trump would have ordinarily been considered misdemeanors that were outside the statute of limitations by the time Bragg brought his case in April last year. However, the prosecutor said those violations were done in the furtherance of another crime and developed a novel scheme to elevate the counts to felonies if the jury agreed that the intent was to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
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A 12-member jury ultimately agreed that Trump falsified the business records with the intent to cover up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of his 2016 campaign. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and is expected to challenge them on appeal after he faces a July 11 sentence hearing.
The Washington Examiner contacted a spokesperson for the EEOC and the NYDL for comment.