A few hours after winning a case that will forever define him, Alvin L. Bragg sent an email to his staff at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
He did not celebrate, or describe the case in detail. He did not mention former President Donald J. Trump at all. Instead, Mr. Bragg thanked the more than 500 prosecutors in his office who were not on the trial team for their patience and hard work.
“I want to assure you that we will do everything in our power to restore normal operations as quickly as possible,” he said.
On Friday, less than 24 hours after he watched jurors announce the first criminal conviction of an American president, Mr. Bragg himself seemed to be seeking a return to normal. He returned to one of his routine trial check-ins, sitting, as he often does, in a mostly empty courtroom and listening to a police officer testify against a man accused of rape and robbery.
It was quintessential Alvin Bragg. He is allergic to milking any moment, no matter how remarkable. Since taking office two years ago, Mr. Bragg, Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, has had an uneasy relationship with the spotlight, particularly when it comes to his case against Mr. Trump.
But while Mr. Bragg may strive for a return to business as usual, it will be difficult to achieve that given the outsize reaction to his momentous case. The adulation he is garnering from Mr. Trump’s political adversaries is mirrored by the invective he is receiving from the former president’s allies. Congressional Republicans have demanded he appear before them, and Mr. Trump’s allies have condemned the conviction as a politically motivated “sham.”
Mr. Bragg declined to respond to attacks by Mr. Trump, who has derided the verdict as the product of a corrupt system while pledging to appeal, or to comment on any potential prison sentence his office might pursue. He held back emotion when asked at a news conference Thursday evening about the years of criticism he received for his handling of the case.
“I did my job, and we did our job,” he said. “There are many voices out there, but the only voice that matters is the voice of the jury, and the jury has spoken.” He ended the news conference after 15 minutes.
He also declined to comment for this article. He has yet to conduct an interview or to reflect publicly on the implications of the conviction: Mr. Trump was found guilty of all 34 felony charges against him related to illegally conspiring to aid his 2016 election by suppressing three negative stories, and covering up the last of them with falsified business records.
In winning the case, Mr. Bragg tarred Mr. Trump as a criminal and also cast doubt on the legitimacy of his first and only winning campaign.
A Harvard-trained former federal prosecutor, Mr. Bragg, 50, has been a target for Republicans since he took office and introduced policies intended to send fewer people to jail. He adjusted some of them after a broad public outcry.
The pressure on him will most likely intensify. On Friday, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, summoned Mr. Bragg and one of the lead prosecutors on the Trump case, Matthew Colangelo, to testify at a hearing. The subject is what Mr. Jordan, in a letter, called “the recent political prosecution of President Donald Trump by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.” (Mr. Jordan and Mr. Bragg also butted heads after Mr. Trump was indicted.)
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg declined to comment.
Mr. Bragg’s tenure has been inextricably linked to his office’s long-running inquiry into Mr. Trump, a case he inherited from his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. But Mr. Bragg began his term not by pursuing a case against Mr. Trump, but by declining to do so.
Mr. Vance had investigated the former president for years, first for a hush-money payment that Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, had made to a porn star and later because Mr. Vance’s prosecutors believed Mr. Trump had committed a crime by fraudulently inflating his net worth.
By the time Mr. Bragg announced his candidacy in a video in summer 2019, the investigation had been paused, and he did not mention any inquiry into Mr. Trump.
Instead, he focused on civics.
“In America, we’re all supposed to be equal under the law, every single one of us,” Mr. Bragg said in the video, adding, “But even now, even here in Manhattan, too often there are two standards of justice: one for the rich and powerful and connected and another for everybody else.”
Two years later, when the campaign to replace Mr. Vance was in full swing, the Trump investigation gained momentum. Mr. Bragg competed with seven other Democratic candidates to signal that he was best equipped to take on the case. He spoke about the former president frequently, but stopped far short of the promises at least one of his primary rivals made to open an investigation into Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka. After winning the election and taking office, he declined to discuss Mr. Trump publicly at all.
Within the office, the Trump investigation became a problem for Mr. Bragg almost immediately. Two months after he was sworn in, senior prosecutors sought his permission to bring a criminal case against the former president for fraudulently inflating his net worth. Mr. Bragg considered that case against Mr. Trump, but ultimately told the prosecutors no.
His decision prompted their resignations and, soon, an uproar over Mr. Bragg’s handling of the inquiry. He was mocked on late-night television; some Democrats accused him of having accepted money to turn down the case.
“I made my determination based on what was presented to me,” he said in an interview in late 2022, reflecting on the decision. He noted that his Republican critics had accused him of being in the pocket of the financier George Soros, who has helped finance campaigns for progressive prosecutors, while his liberal critics had accused him of being in Mr. Trump’s pocket.
“That’s a pretty weird pocket,” Mr. Bragg joked then.
By then, he had quietly refocused his office’s investigation into Mr. Trump, moving from the net worth case back to the hush-money payment to the porn star, Stormy Daniels.
The payment was one of three stemming from an August 2015 meeting Mr. Trump had with Mr. Cohen and the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker. Mr. Pecker says he agreed at the meeting to suppress negative news stories that could hurt Mr. Trump’s nascent presidential campaign.
Two stories were bought and buried by Mr. Pecker, but the third — Ms. Daniels’s story of having had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006 — was bought by Mr. Cohen, who said he had done so at Mr. Trump’s direction. Mr. Trump, who denies Ms. Daniels’s story, reimbursed Mr. Cohen with checks, signing most of them in the Oval Office, each one purportedly related to a nonexistent retainer agreement.
Cases involving false business records are a staple of the Manhattan district attorney’s white collar practice. In internal meetings, Mr. Bragg suggested that Mr. Trump could be charged with falsifying business records to cover up a violation of a little-known state law that bars illegal conspiracies to aid a candidate’s election. It was a novel and seemingly risky legal theory to apply in a case against a former president. (In New York, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor unless the records are faked to conceal another crime.)
The case was not well understood, and widely criticized, when Mr. Bragg secured an indictment against Mr. Trump in March 2023, becoming the first prosecutor ever to charge an American president. It was criticized further when it became clear that, despite Mr. Trump’s facing three other indictments related to his conduct while in office, it would be the first case to go to trial.
But in the face of that criticism and throughout the trial, staff members have said, Mr. Bragg remained tranquil. One member of Mr. Bragg’s staff who spent time with him during weeks of trial described him as eerily calm, as his prosecutors questioned 22 witnesses, including Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump did not testify.
Mr. Bragg’s approach was validated on Thursday when, after deliberating for less than two days, a jury returned one of the most consequential convictions in U.S. history.
But Mr. Bragg declined to wax eloquent about the case’s singular nature, acknowledging it briefly before moving on to its similarities to others his office pursues.
“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history,” Mr. Bragg said on Thursday, “we arrived at this trial, and ultimately today at this verdict, in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and the law.”
