Manhattan District Attorney Gets Primary Challenger 2 Years Early

NEW YORK — Law professor and former prosecutor Alvin Bragg launched his Democratic campaign for Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday, giving incumbent DA Cyrus Vance Jr. an early re-election fight.

Bragg is running as a progressive reformer touting a record of going after the powerful as a federal prosecutor and top deputy in the state Attorney General's Office, where he worked for more than five years. He's currently a professor at New York Law School.

The self-described "son of Central Harlem" is jumping into the race about two years before Manhattan's Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Vance for a fourth term as the borough's top prosecutor in 2021.

"I’m running because far too often, we have two standards of justice — one for the rich and powerful and connected and another for everyone else," Bragg said in a statement.

Bragg most recently served as the state's chief deputy attorney general, a post in which he says he oversaw high-profile cases targeting President Donald Trump's charity and the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein. He was also the first chief of the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit, which reviews police killings of unarmed civilians.

Bragg's campaign launch video highlights Vance's decision not to prosecute Trump's children and Weinstein in separate cases dating back to 2012 and 2015, respectively. By contrast, the video points out that the DA's office has gone after poor New Yorkers for low-level crimes such as buying food with a counterfeit bill or selling a cigarette.

"It’s not just the cases of the famous and privileged with their high-powered legal teams who manage to escape prosecution. It's the stories of all those who don’t," Bragg said in the video.

Bragg is jumping in the race early because of his fundraising strategy, his campaign says. He won't accept money from corporations, lobbyists or lawyers who appear before the DA's office — a practice for which Vance has taken heat.

News reports in 2017 said that Vance got big campaign contributions from lawyers for the Trump family and Weinstein around the time that he closed probes into their clients. The revelations sparked a write-in challenge from the civil rights attorney Marc Fliedner, which Vance easily survived.

The DA won more than 182,000 votes in the November 2017 election to Fliedner's roughly 12,000. He subsequently said he would not accept campaign money from lawyers appearing before his office and limit contributions from their law partners. His office has since brought rape and predatory sexual assault charges against Weinstein.

Bragg also pledged to conduct thorough probes of police misconduct, overhaul the office's sex crimes unit and boost funding for re-entry programs if he's elected.

"I've always fought to defend the rights of those without status or power, New Yorkers who need justice most, and deserve it," Bragg said in his video. "As DA, from Day One, I’ll work to make the office the progressive leader it should be."

Vance was first elected in 2009 to succeed Robert Morgenthau, who had led the office since 1975. While she did not address Bragg by name, Vance campaign spokesperson Anna Durrett said the DA "is focused on continuing to make New York City’s justice system fairer, more efficient, and more effective for all New Yorkers."

"From ending the criminal prosecution of tens of thousands of low-level offenses and successfully reducing gang and gun violence, to building Manhattan’s Family Justice Center for victims of domestic violence and investing hundreds of millions of financial crime forfeiture dollars into Manhattan communities to strengthen families and prevent crime, DA Vance is continuing his work to reduce crime to historic lows, while also moving our criminal justice system forward," Durrett said in a statement.