NEW YORK -- Alvin Bragg has already notched one historic first, taking office Saturday as Manhattan's first Black district attorney. Now he's weighing another: whether to make Donald Trump the first former president ever charged with a crime.
As district attorney, Bragg inherited an investigation into Trump and his business practices from his predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., who declined to seek re-election last year after 12 years in the high-profile job.
After weeks of speculation about whether Vance would close his tenure with a bang by indicting Trump, the former district attorney has passed that decision to Bragg, a 48-year-old civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor who was sworn in at a private ceremony, in part because of covid-19 concerns.
Bragg told CNN last month that he'll be directly involved in the Trump matter. He also said he has asked the two veteran prosecutors who led the case under Vance -- general counsel Carey Dunne and former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz -- to stay on and see it through.
"This is obviously a consequential case, one that merits the attention of the D.A. personally," Bragg told CNN.
The investigation resulted in charges last summer against the Trump Organization and its longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. In the fall, Vance convened a new grand jury to hear evidence in the case.
The former president remains under investigation by the office after Vance led a multiyear fight to get access to the Republican's tax records.
As a top deputy to New York's attorney general in 2018, Bragg helped oversee a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trump's charitable foundation over allegations that he used the nonprofit to further his political and business interests.
Bragg campaigned partly on a promise to change the culture of the district attorney's office.
He spent the final days of his campaign participating in a rare judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner, whose pleas of "I can't breathe" to police officers who hauled him to the ground in a chokehold became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2014. Bragg called it the most "emotionally significant" case of his career.
Being elected district attorney, Bragg said voters had given him a "profound trust."
"The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety," Bragg told supporters on election night.