New York state will "not normalise" serious criminal conduct, "no matter who you are," Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has asserted, hours after former US President Donald Trump was arraigned in a courtroom.
Trump, 76, the first former US president to be criminally charged, pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential elections at his arraignment in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday.
Bragg is the first Black Manhattan district attorney and a fellow New Yorker who handed over an indictment on criminal charges to Trump.
Trump repeatedly made false statements on business records in New York in an effort to cover up other crimes, Bragg said at a press conference held shortly after Trump's arraignment Tuesday afternoon, the Politico newspaper reported.
The former president pleaded not guilty to the 34 felony charges.
”These are felony crimes in New York state, no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalise serious criminal conduct,” Bragg told reporters.
”Under New York state law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about: 34 false statements, made to cover up other crimes,” Bragg told reporters.
Bragg said that Trump, executives at the publishing company American Media Incorporated, Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen, and others agreed to a ”catch and kill” scheme in 2015, planning to ”buy and suppress negative information to help Trump's chances of winning the election.”
As part of that scheme, Bragg said, Trump and others made three different payments to people who claimed to have negative information about the former president that Trump and his allies worried would hurt his chances of winning the 2016 presidential election.
One of those three people was Stormy Daniels, Bragg said, the porn star who claimed she had an affair with Trump -- and whom Cohen has admitted to making a USD 130,000 hush money payment, claiming he did so at Trump's behest.
Born in Harlem, Bragg, 49, was sworn in as the 37th district attorney of New York county (Manhattan) in January 2022.
One year ago, the Manhattan district attorney's investigation into Trump appeared to be dead in the water.
The two leaders of the investigation recently resigned after Bragg decided not to charge Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision -- and a brutal start to his tenure -- Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were so few signs of it, the New York Times reported.
This account of Bragg's decision to revive the investigation and point it toward the hush-money arrangement reveals the circuitous and sometimes uncertain road that led to the first criminal charges against a former American president, the report added.
In a statement on Thursday, after the indictment was reported, Trump called the case a ”political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history,” adding that Bragg was ”a disgrace” and calling himself ”a completely innocent person."
Before being sworn in as district attorney, Bragg was a visiting professor of law and co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School.
In that role, he represented Eric Garner's mother and sister in a lawsuit against the City of New York seeking details concerning Garner's death.
The 43-year-old African-American man was killed in July 2014 on a Staten Island sidewalk after being placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer.
Bragg studied at Harvard University and Harvard Law School and clerked for Robert P Patterson, Jr in the Southern District of New York.
He is a former member of the board of directors of the New York Urban League and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and a Sunday School teacher at his church.
