Alvin Bragg’s Long Game

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s declaration that he does not oppose a postponement of President Trump’s sentencing in the New York criminal trial is a head scratcher. It was Mr. Bragg who persuaded a Gotham jury to convict the 45th president on 34 counts for falsification of business records in connection with payments to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels. The case was widely seen as flimsy, yet once launched it sailed to nearly three dozen “guilty” verdicts.After such a triumph, a prosecutor would usually like to secure sentencing with dispatch. Mr. Bragg, though, appears oddly nonchalant as to when Judge Juan Merchan metes out Trump’s punishment. He writes Judge Merchan that the People “defer to the Court on whether an adjournment is warranted to allow for orderly appellate litigation” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark immunity ruling in Trump v. United States.Trump contends that the finding from the Nine that official presidential acts are presumptively immune upends the convictions secured by Mr. Bragg. The district attorney maintains that none of the 45th president’s “arguments merit any consideration,” and he even calls one of them “bizarre.” Judge Merchan is due to rule on the immunity issue on September 16. Why is Mr. Bragg agnostic as to whether sentencing follows?The district attorney, an elected Democrat, could be — gasp — playing politics. Well, of course. At stake is whether a former and possibly future president heads to the White House or the clink. When Mr. Bragg was running for office, he promised to hold Trump “accountable by following the facts where they go” and boasted that he “sued the Trump administration more than 100 times.” He pushed the case after the feds decided to drop it. Then there is Judge Merchan. Political questions have surrounded him, too. An ethics panel warned him last summer over donating small sums — but sums nonetheless — to the Biden campaign and a group called “Stop Republicans.” His adult daughter, Loren, is the president of a left-wing consulting group whose clients have numbered the Senate campaign of Vice President Harris. None of this is improper under New York’s law on judicial conflicts.Nor has it been enough to vindicate Trump’s efforts that Judge Merchan recuse himself. Still, the notion remains from some that justice’s blindfolds here have not been impenetrably — meaning adequately — opaque. Trump, too, appears to have benefited. When the guilty verdict was brought in last June, it failed to crater his bid for the White House. Some even credit the verdict with strengthening his candidacy in a crowded primary field. So it’s hardly outlandish to imagine that Mr. Bragg and the Democrats could now reckon that the spectacle of Trump being sentenced to prison could throw a wrench into Ms. Harris’s sprint to the White House by reminding Americans of the commandeering of the courts to do work best reserved for the ballot box. Such a long game, after all, would be a lot more shocking than the verdicts the jury brought in.

Alvin Bragg’s Long Game

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