A top Justice Department official said the quiet part out loud, ripping Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump as”nonsense.”
Nicholas Biase, the chief spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office was caught on a hidden camera ripping into Bragg, and accusing the DA of waging “lawfare” against Trump to further his own political ambitions.
“He wants to be, something … a mayor? I’m not sure what he wants to be, but I know he’s not happy just being the DA of New York County. Before he decided to prosecute Trump, did you know who he was? You do now,” he said in one clip.
Two edited undercover conversations were recorded by an operative for conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s “Mug Club” and subsequently posted on social media.
The New York Post has the story.
A top Department of Justice spokesman in New York was caught on a hidden camera ripping Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for his recent prosecution of former President Donald Trump — accusing Bragg of conducting “lawfare” just to further his own political ambitions.
Nicholas Biase, chief spokesman for the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office, was secretly recorded tearing into the progressive prosecutor during a recent conversation with a so-called undercover operative from conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s “Mug Club.”
“Honestly, I think the case is nonsense,” Biase was filmed saying to an unidentified woman on July 31 at what appears to be a bar.
The edited clip, and another from August 14, were released by Crowder on social media Thursday. The identity of the woman who secretly recorded the exchange with Biase wasn’t made public. The Post has not reviewed the full, unedited recordings.
Biase — who said he’d known Bragg for 15 years and previously worked with him at SDNY — described the unprecedented hush money case against Trump as a “perversion of justice” in the footage.
He also claimed the headline-grabbing prosecutor pursued the case to make a name for himself and run for higher office.
“He wants to be, something … a mayor? I’m not sure what he wants to be, but I know he’s not happy just being the DA of New York County. Before he decided to prosecute Trump, did you know who he was? You do now,” he said in the clip.
An apologetic Biase told The Post in a statement Thursday that he made the remarks in a private setting with someone he’d “just met” and was trying to “impress.”
At one point in the video, Biase accused Bragg of “stacking charges [against Trump] and, like, rearranging things just to make it fit a case.”
Trump, who was convicted on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records over payments made to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election, is set to be sentenced on Sept. 18.
“This guy is probably going to try to lock him [Trump] up. And there is going to be, it’s going to be ugly…,” Biase said, in an apparent reference to Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case.
“They are so obsessed with getting him [Trump],” he continued.
Asked whom he meant by “they,” Biase shot back: “The Democrats … It affects his candidacy if he’s a convicted felon.”
But the spokesman said the apparent ruse backfired.
“Those felonies did nothing to stop Trump from running … In fact, they made him [Trump] more relevant,” Biase said in the recording.