Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, campaigned for the job with a promise to go after Trump.

Bragg campaigned in 2021 promising to continue trying to hold Trump “accountable,” noting that in the New York attorney general’s office he had sued Trump “more than a hundred times.” In 2023, seven years after a particular Trump misbehavior, but just in time to influence this year’s election, Bragg indicted Trump for “34” felonies. One dead misdemeanor (falsifying business records; the statute of limitations has long since expired) was resuscitated and carved into 34 slices. These were inflated into felonies by claiming they were done to facilitate a crime. (Bragg often has a progressive’s penchant for reducing felonies to misdemeanors — e.g., some first-degree robberies are now charged as petty larcenies.) Bragg says: Trump used bookkeeping dishonesty in 2017 (about paying hush money, which is not illegal) to influence the 2016 presidential election. (A puzzling understanding of causation.) He was a candidate in the 2016 election he is accused of somehow illegitimately trying to influence. This violated a federal campaign finance law. (Enforcement of which Congress assigned to the Federal Election Commission, not to local district attorneys.)

The 12 jurors might give 12 different answers concerning what Trump is guilty of. But what sentence might Bragg advocate next month?

More From The Washington Post (subscription required):