Liam Conner
Former President Donald Trump frequently arrives at your Criminal trial in New York flanked by elected officials who choose to spend their time sitting in a courtroom.
They sit in the first two rows of the court next to Trump, a section reserved for his team. On the prosecution side, the same section usually has an empty seat, reserved for a public official chosen primarily to perform other work during the trial: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney.
Bragg has participated in parts of the proceedings here and there, particularly on days when his own team – including young paralegals – are called to testify as custodial witnesses and are then subjected to cross-examination by the defense.
“Bragg is doing this the right way,” said Domenic Trunfio, a law professor at Syracuse University.
Trunfio managed the day-to-day operations of the Onandaga County district attorney’s office in Syracuse for nearly two decades, with a jurisdiction of about half a million people, a third the size of Manhattan. He said it is significant that Bragg appears for his team.
“It shows support. It says, ‘Hey, I’m here. I know you’re testifying in a case against the former president of the United States. And I’m here to help you,'” Trunfio said.
That was the case when paralegal Georgia Longstreet was challenged by Trump lawyer Todd Blanche about whether she had independent knowledge of how X (formerly Twitter) or Trump’s Truth Social network attach timestamps to social media posts — or whether she could affirmatively say who Trump was talking about when he posted, “If you come after me, I will come after you!”
“I have my guesses, but no,” Longstreet said, sitting about 10 feet from Trump.
And he watched another Trump lawyer, Emil Bove, ask legal assistant Jaden Jarmel-Schneider if creating phone call log charts was “tedious” work.
“Honestly, I liked it,” Jarmel-Schneider said, drawing laughter from the courtroom.
“I heard that. Respect,” Bove responded.
A spokesperson for Bragg declined to comment for this story.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the case, in which he is accused of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records. The documents were allegedly intended to conceal “hush money” payments made in 2016 to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who at the time agreed not to speak publicly about a sexual encounter that Trump denies.
Bragg attended parts of about a third of the 18-day trial, but even that level of participation is extraordinarily rare for a Manhattan district attorney, according to Diana Florence, who worked for Bragg’s two predecessors.
“In my 25-year career, where I have handled many high-profile cases, the prosecutor has attended my summations a few times and my opening statements a few times,” Florence said. “But generally speaking, that wasn’t something they would do.”
Florence said prosecutors are typically too busy with other aspects of the job to participate in trials, such as promoting legislation relevant to law enforcement or their office and reviewing other important cases that come before grand juries.
Bragg has done both in the last month. Among other things, he advocated for an update to New York’s hate crimes legislation that was included in the state’s 2025 fiscal year budget, sent a letter asking YouTube to modify algorithms that he said recommended videos to children about how to make ghost guns and 3D-printed guns, and he joined a push for a bill that would allow prosecutors to more easily present evidence in sex crime cases that show “bad” previous experiences of the defendants. acts.”
This project was inspired by an April 25 New York Court of Appeals decision overturning rape conviction from former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
His office also announced major indictments, including those related to the murder of a man pushed in front of a subway, sex trafficking, a large-scale robbery ring and a notorious landlord accused of harassing his tenants.
Florence and Trunfio said that for big cases like these, as well as the Weinstein case and of course the Trump case, prosecutors need buy-in from the prosecutor. Ultimately, it’s his name on the indictment.
“The elephant in the room here is that this is the biggest criminal case anyone has seen in a century,” Trunfio said.
