Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is facing two lawsuits after refusing to share key details about the background of his legal vendetta against former President Donald Trump.
Trump was indicted in March on multiple counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The Heritage Foundation has filed Freedom of Information requests under New York state laws to determine whether Bragg was actively plotting with congressional Democrats and if there were side deals cut for legal services.
Mike Howell, director of Heritage’s Oversight Project, contends Bragg was “coordinating, or otherwise communicating” with Trump’s political opponents, according to Fox News.
“The fact we have to file a lawsuit against Bragg who says he can’t produce these records and says he doesn’t have the systems to do so, is proof-positive of another dual standard of justice at play in this country,” Howell said.
“You have a weaponized actor who’s going after the former president on a loony theory about his document retention, whereas the DA can’t even keep his own documents, and it’s in violation of the information laws he is bound by,” he continued.
“He’s a hypocrite. He’s wasting an exorbitant amount of New York’s taxpayers’ dollars to defend this now and delay it and obstruct it when he could’ve just turned it over,” Howell said.
The text of one lawsuit noted that Bragg’s prosecution of Trump has been attacked as a persecution.
The suit said “these criticisms and the Congressional investigations featured front and center in reports that DA Bragg may have coordinated his case with President Trump’s political opponents in the White House, the United States Department of Justice (‘DOJ’), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (‘FBI’), and Congress.”
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“Regrettably, these questions have not been met with answers. These reports have raised concerns in many circles based in large part upon the longstanding history of President Trump’s political opponents coordinating their activities to systematically weaponize the criminal justice system against him and thereby pervert the course of Justice,” the suit said.
The lawsuit noted that the response to the FOIL request indicated that because the information was requested was linked to a pending prosecution, it was beyond the reach of the state’s law.
However, the lawsuit said, there was no “explanation as to how on the current public record a communication with a Democratic Member of Congress could possibly be ‘sealed’ or ‘grand jury’ material.”
According to the text of the second lawsuit was that the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, under Bragg and his predecessor, apparently received “millions of dollars in free legal services from Davis, Polk & Wardwell LLP (‘Davis Polk’), and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP (‘Paul Weiss’).”
“These firms are involved in many different endeavors best characterized as ‘political’ and as major international law firms with robust white collar defense practices, clearly have an ‘interest’ in how the District Attorney of the County of New York conducts his affairs,” the lawsuit said.
“Publicly available details of these apparently free legal services are incomplete and raise more questions than they answer,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuits want the documents showing Bragg’s communications with Democrats and the law firms “subject to release under the New York Freedom of Information Law.”
“Bragg crossed the Rubicon by indicting President Trump on a document retention dispute. Well, now he has a document retention dispute with us. We look forward to him being forced to comply with the law. The weaponization must end and we will do all we can to see that it does,” Howell said, according to the Washington Examiner.
