Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg continues to attract all of the wrong sorts of attention as he moves forward with his politically motivated prosecution of Donald Trump on nonsensical charges. This process is already painting a permanent stain on the office of the District Attorney and shining a bright light on the double standards being employed in both the judicial and law enforcement systems. But that doesn’t mean that Bragg will be without his own defenders. Yesterday, the Associated Press attempted to ride to the rescue, featuring a “FACT FOCUS” article (in all caps) by Philip Marcelo and Ali Swenson claiming that Bragg’s record is being “distorted” by critics. Unfortunately for them, even a brief glance at their supposed “facts” causes the article to fall flat on its face.

Ahead of former President Donald Trump’s expected booking and arraignment in New York City on Tuesday, social media users are accusing Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, of having poor prosecutorial judgment in other cases.

But some posts distort Bragg’s decisions, from falsely accusing him of ignoring a case his office is prosecuting to misleadingly suggesting he should investigate a case outside his jurisdiction.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

The article is rife with the usual claims about “disinformation” on social media, with the authors claiming that this is all in your imagination. There are simple “misunderstandings” about Bragg which should be easy to clear up. But what sorts of “claims” are they examining and which are they ignoring?

The first case they cite is the June 2022 shooting of a Manhattan subway passenger by Andrew Abdullah. I remember the shooting well because of its totally random and horrible nature, but I didn’t see anyone claiming that he wasn’t being prosecuted. Nor did the AP offer a link to anyone making such a claim. They simply said that the shooting “provides an example of the “real crime in Manhattan” that Bragg should be prosecuting.” For the record, Abdullah is being held without bail as the case moves forward. So all the AP managed to do there was find one (rare) example of Bragg’s office doing their jobs.

The article then moves on to the case that I covered here on Sunday involving garage attendant Moussa Diarra. He’s the guy who was shot twice by a robber before taking away the gun and shooting his attacker. The “CLAIM” (again in all caps) cited by the AP is “Bragg is charging a New York City parking garage attendant for attempted murder after he shot an alleged armed robber.” They follow this up with “THE FACTS,” stating, “Bragg’s office isn’t prosecuting Moussa Diarra.”

What the Associated Press conveniently forgets to mention is that the shooting took place on Saturday morning and Moussa Diarra most certainly was charged with attempted murder. That was true on Saturday and it was true on Sunday morning when I wrote about it. Speaking of “FACTS,” pictures of Diarra sobbing while being literally handcuffed to his hospital bed emerged on Sunday. If he wasn’t charged with anything, why would the guy with two bullet wounds be handcuffed? The article then goes on to admit that “Both [of the men] were hospitalized and initially charged with attempted murder, assault and gun possession.” Yes, the charges were eventually dropped, but it clearly demonstrated Bragg’s initial impulse, which was to charge the victim, as he’s done in other cases. And when people were making that claim over the weekend it was absolutely true.

The final example the AP offers as proof of Bragg’s record being distorted involves an attack on a 15-year-old girl by a group of teen gangbangers back in 2020. Not only did this attack take place before Bragg was in office, but it happened in Brooklyn, so it would have been outside his jurisdiction anyway. Once again, I couldn’t find anyone blaming Bragg for this and the AP again failed to link to any specific claims. If anyone actually did try to pin that on Bragg they were mistaken. I’m sure it’s possible that somebody brought up that attack as an example of how dangerous the streets of New York have become, but it’s unrelated to the current, fully justified criticism of Bragg’s horrendous performance in office.

We didn’t bring up the Alvin Bragg story just as some sort of defense for Donald Trump while the DA engages in a blatant attempt at election manipulation. We’ve been covering him ever since he was sworn into office when he promised to empty the jails and prosecute as few people as possible. In a matter of weeks, he was releasing violent criminals from jail and facing calls from his own prosecutors for the Governor to remove him. (She did “put him on notice” but took no further action.) We were covering this story more than a year ago when some of his own prosecutors quit over the Trump investigation. Officials from both sides of the aisle have described Alvin Bragg as “the worst DA ever.” So the Associated Press should not try to paint a happy face on this situation and claim that people are spreading “misinformation” about Bragg in some effort to make Trump look better. And they should consider taking that article down. Bragg has been a disaster from day one and his wild goose chase after Trump has only been the latest chapter in a long tale of failures.