The guilty verdict in former President Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial shows how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has helped warp New York City’s justice system.
Bragg’s case against Trump was nothing more than a bookkeeping crime trumped up into a felony under the theory that Trump purposefully misclassified hush money payments to deceive voters before an election. Or that it was done as a tax crime. Or that it was a false business record. Turns out, in Bragg’s justice system, the jury doesn’t have to agree on which crime they are convicting someone of in the first place.
In a vacuum, the case against Trump is a damning indictment of Bragg and his view that the justice system can and should be used as a political weapon against the opposing party to try and influence the 2024 election, so much so that Bragg himself campaigned on it. When combined with a glance at Bragg’s track record, though, it becomes clear that his corrupted ideology is that violent and dangerous criminals should be protected while political opponents and law-abiding citizens must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of his warped interpretations of the law.
Bragg’s tortured twisting of the law to go after Trump is only the tip of the iceberg. You may recall that he is currently threatening a Marine veteran with 19 years behind bars because he tried to protect passengers on the subway from an aggressive homeless man who was threatening them and ended up inadvertently killing him after putting him in a chokehold. Daniel Penny was protecting himself and others from being attacked, and he is facing second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges for it.
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Criminalizing self-defense has been a defining trait of Bragg’s tenure. He threw a 61-year-old bodega worker in Rikers Island for stabbing a violent parolee who was in the process of assaulting him, despite video showing exactly how the entire assault went down. Bragg even pushed forward with it until a second video and a cascade of pressure forced him to drop it.
To recap: In Bragg’s ideal justice system, self-defense is illegal, but politicians he dislikes are targets for him to manipulate the law to go after so as to secure some political points for his team. Meanwhile, he came into office telling prosecutors to ease up on people who commit actual, identifiable crimes. Bragg has turned New York City’s justice system into a twisted mess of grievance and intimidation, targeting everyone except real criminals who make the city less safe.