The Manhattan district attorney who is prosecuting former President Trump for alleged campaign finance violations compared him to sex criminals Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein during his 2021 campaign.
In January 2021, as he was campaigning for district attorney, Alvin Bragg argued that "being a rich, old White man has allowed you to evade accountability" in the New York City borough, and that he would make sure to hold Trump "accountable" if elected.
"We got two standards of justice," he said during a radio interview on WQHT. "Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein – being a rich, old White man has allowed you to evade accountability in Manhattan. That includes Trump and his children — they were engaged in fraud in a SoHo real estate deal with his children."
Bragg was referencing a civil lawsuit the Trump Organization settled a decade earlier in 2011. Trump SoHo condominium purchasers who initially claimed to have been defrauded by Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump "reversed course and took the position that the sellers had not committed any crime against them" after the organization agreed to refund their sales deposits, the DA’s office said at the time.
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"So, you are right, we have two standards of justice," Bragg continued in his radio interview, speaking to co-hosts Ebro Darden and Peter Rosenberg. "I grew up in the second standard in Harlem. I know all about it."
"I’m the candidate in the race who has the experience with Donald Trump," he said at the time. "I was the chief deputy in the attorney general’s office. We sued the Trump administration over 100 times, for the Muslim travel ban, for family separation at the border, for shenanigans with the census. So, I know how to litigate with him. I also led the team that did the Trump Foundation case. So, I’m ready to go wherever the facts take me, and to inherit that case. And I think it’d be hard to argue with the fact that that’d be the most important, most high-profile case."
Bragg won the election that November, taking over the years-long investigation into Trump’s business dealings from retiring District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. On March 30, Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from a $130,000 hush-money payment to an adult film actress.
Trump, who has characterized the charges against him as a political witch hunt, posted a clip of Bragg’s 2021 comments on his Truth Social site just days before his indictment in March.
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Bragg said during the interview that he had to be careful talking about Trump on the campaign trail, "because I don’t want to prejudge, and then I get into office and then the first motion I get from the Trump team is I got to recuse myself because I have prejudged the facts."
He added, "I have seen a pattern of lawlessness over 20 years, and so I am inclined to believe all I have seen in the public domain and believe that there’s a path forward there to make the case."
Fox News Digital asked Bragg’s office whether it was the district attorney’s opinion that Trump had not yet been convicted of a crime in Manhattan because he is a "rich, old White man," and whether his office could clarify how Trump, Epstein and Weinstein are comparable, but it did not respond.
Bragg oversaw lawsuits against Weinstein and The Weinstein Company while serving as chief deputy attorney general under former New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
