Departing Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance will turn ongoing investigations of former President Trump to over to his successor, Alvin Bragg. “I am committed to moving the case as far along in the decision-making as I can while I’m here,” said Vance, 67. A Democrat who was only the fourth district attorney to hold the office in nearly 80 years, Vance chose not to seek re-election. He said he had promised his family he would not run again, the New York Times reports. “Twelve years is a long time to hold an office this volatile,” he said, adding, “It was time for me to write a new chapter in my life.” The fate of the Trump inquiry, which could result in the first indictment of a U.S. president in history, will help shape the public understanding of Vance’s tenure.
Asked how he might deal with criticism if the case is not resolved to people’s liking, Vance said, "Do I have to put it all in perspective? Yeah. And if you don’t put it in perspective, you’ll shoot yourself. Because people are passionate and they’re angry, and people have only gotten more divided and more angry in the last five or six years than they ever were before.” Vance had worked as a prosecutor for his predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, who died in 2019. Vance said, “I was inheriting an office that was very much a 20th-century operation in terms of its systems and its practices and its policies. It was, ‘How many trials did you have?’ It was, ‘How aggressive can you be?’” Vance instituted a less sweeping, more precise approach to addressing gang and gun violence. He stopped prosecuting certain low-level misdemeanors, including marijuana possession, fare evasion and prostitution. He moved his office into the digital age, using data to inform decisions. He started a cybercrime unit and used hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with big banks to fund programs that he argued would make the city safer.
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