Interview: Maud Maron Takes on Alvin Bragg

Long-time public defender, law professor, education advocate and former congressional candidate Maud Maron is running against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who has been heavily criticized for his soft-on-crime prosecution policies, including a “day one memo” which reportedly instructed his assistant DA’s to completely avoid prosecuting certain crimes and to give the lowest possible sentences to others.

Bragg also gained national attention as he was the prosecutor in President Donald Trump’s New York court case.

Maron says that the Democratic Socialist of American party, which represents the same ideas, are a “Little Pac-Man that’s been eating up the Democrats in the Democratic Party.”

She spoke with Belaaz about her candidacy and what she hopes to accomplish.

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Maron: I’m still the same reasonable, classic liberal, moderate human being I ever was. I have an R by my name instead of a D, but I am exactly the same person since we last spoke. Just more battles.

So you officially changed parties?

Maron: It’s technically possible to be on the party line even if you’re not of that party. In New York, there’s a procedure where you can make it happen, but I switched to run.

What are your main arguments against Alvin Bragg?

Maron: Bragg is wedded to ideology, and I have always been about practical solutions. His day-one memo and all his policy implementation since then have been about institutionalizing an ideology. He is a defunder and decarcerationist who believes police are upholders of white supremacy and all the other nonsense that you get from DSA and DSA-adjacent candidates.
We need a city that’s safe for everybody: to walk down the street, to take the subway, and for stores to be able to prop open a door on a hot day and know that their shelves won’t be cleared out by people with giant garbage bags. Those people may or may not be arrested. But if arrested, they are released the same day to come back and do it again the next. That’s not practical governance. We need a safer city. You can look at many cities in our country, state, and the rest of the world where they just wouldn’t put up with what we’re forced to put up with.

The idea that drugstores can’t have products on their shelves—products that cost less than $5—that get locked up because we’ve structured our society around thieves instead of around the law-abiding, tax-paying, rule-following people who live here is insane. It’s absolutely insane. It’s like boiling the frog in water. We get used to more and more stupid, insane things over time, and we forget that this is an insane way to live.

How does your background, including in school advocacy, apply to the position of District Attorney?

Maron: I was a public defender for over two decades, so I’ve worked in that courthouse. I’ve worked at 100 Centre Street for more years than Alvin Bragg has, so I know what criminal justice looks like when it’s working much better than it is now. Robert Morgenthau was the DA in this city for 35 years, and for the first decade-plus of my career, I worked in that courthouse from the other side of the aisle when he was the DA. We need to go back to that.

We need to go back to a system where all crimes are prosecuted. If it’s a crime on the books—whether it’s fare beating, resisting arrest, or graffiti, things that the DSA wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t want to prosecute—all those things should be prosecuted. If you think resisting a police officer’s lawful order shouldn’t be a crime, then go to Albany and change the law. But if it is a crime, then when people commit that crime, they should be arrested and prosecuted appropriately. I know how to do that. I have been a criminal defense attorney for my whole professional career. These are not hard things to do. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel; I’m trying to do the most basic job there is: uphold the law.

What would you do if Zohran Mamdani wins? He wants to decriminalize many things in the city. How would you deal with his administration?

Maron: First of all, it’s not up to him to decriminalize things. Thankfully, he can’t do that. The law is set in Albany. There are people who have even questioned whether Bragg has the authority to do what he’s doing. If we had a governor who took her role seriously, Bragg should be removed from office, because you can’t be elected to the job of prosecutor and then say, “I’m going to pick and choose which crimes I want to prosecute.”

As it is, because he picked the lefty, unfavored crimes like resisting arrest, fare beating, and petit larceny, a lot of New York’s power base shrugged. But imagine if he said, “I’m not going to prosecute assault. People have to duke it out themselves.”—nobody would have accepted that, because that’s insane. But what he did say he wouldn’t prosecute is also insane. Resisting arrest, fare beating, and petit larceny… And both of them [Bragg and Mamdani] want to look the other way on crimes of moral turpitude. The truth is, that’s because the left has decided that some things that are inherently wrong are somehow good.

Mamdani and Bragg together are the worst possible combination. If we’re going to be stuck with a Mayor Mamdani, we need a District Attorney in Manhattan who doesn’t want to support his decriminalization efforts.

Mamdani won a sizable number of votes from people who support that soft-on-crime mentality and who don’t want to prosecute those kinds of crimes. Even if your approach speaks to common sense, what if the electorate, especially in Manhattan, doesn’t feel that way? How do you convince people to change their minds?

Maron: I could be wrong, but I don’t think he’s going to get many more votes in the general than he got in the primary. Unfortunately, all the guys who ran in the primary are now running in the general. He’s already got his votes—all of those privileged little socialist, gentrifying kids whose daddies are paying the bills. He’s got their votes locked up solid.

I was talking to someone yesterday, calling to ask for donations to my campaign. The guy I was talking to, an older Jewish man, said, “Oh, Mamdani, he’s so terrible,” but he didn’t realize that Bragg’s the same thing. They’re like two peas in a pod. We were talking about “defund the police,” and he said, “That was a big idea for a few months, but it’s sort of gone away.” I said, “What do you mean it’s gone away? Mamdani is a huge adherent of it.” His “department of community safety”—you can name it something else, but it’s still the same thing if you’re saying less money to police and putting the money somewhere else.

He was convinced that Mamdani is terrible but couldn’t bring himself to vote Republican because “Donald Trump is the bad orange man.” I couldn’t care less whether you have a D or an R by your name. Are your ideas solid? Is the vision that you want to support and promote, if elected, good for the people who live here?

So if elected, you would simply carry out the law on the books?

Maron: Yes, and also fix what’s going wrong with the relationship between the prosecutor’s office and the NYPD. You cannot have a functioning society without functioning law enforcement. This constant anti-police stuff is a privileged, indulged, luxury belief. It’s nonsense. You have to work with the police. The police are working-class people, for the most part, in our city. The rich, spoiled kids protesting at Columbia University, putting up their encampments and talking about the Middle East that they know absolutely nothing about—those are all spoiled kids, and none of them would ever choose to live in a society that didn’t have police.

Speaking of the protests, there were some prosecutions, but most of the protesters, including the ones who destroyed property and were violent, got off with pretty much nothing. What would you have done in that situation?

Maron: I’ve talked to people who have talked to Bragg about this, and he tells everybody, “No, we couldn’t prosecute because we didn’t have enough evidence.” He dismissed some of those cases within 24 hours! Of course, you have no evidence within 24 hours; you haven’t made an effort to build a case. You have to interview all of the people. You have to offer plea bargains to some people who will give you information about others. You have to do the job of a prosecutor. Can you prosecute every single case, every time? Maybe not. There are good defense lawyers out there who do their jobs, too. But Bragg is clearly not interested in prosecuting protesters who are protesting left-wing issues because he’s a left-wing prosecutor.

What’s your overall message to voters?

Maron: If we want to clean up crime in Manhattan, we know how to do it. But we have to elect rational people who understand and want to follow the law, and we have to get rid of the ideologues like Mamdani and Bragg who are pushing an agenda over public safety.

Does your campaign have any polling data on the race?

Maron: We did some polling, and Bragg is a lot weaker than an incumbent Democrat should be in Manhattan. If the powers that be ever wanted to invest in my campaign seriously, Bragg is vulnerable. But it’s very hard to convince people Republicans can win in New York. So far, I’ve not raked in the big bucks.

I’ve heard a lot of voters say there’s this knee-jerk reaction: “Must be a Democrat.”

Maron: “Must vote Democrat” is why we have Mamdani. For me, as the Democratic Party became increasingly radical… the DSA is like a little Pac-Man that’s been eating up the Democrats in the Democratic Party.

I saw the Democratic Party become increasingly leftist in a way that was both anti-Semitic and anti-classic liberal values of free speech and the values that I care about. I thought, this doesn’t work. I’m not going to keep hanging out in a party where every politician is afraid of being primaried from the left, but not remotely afraid of being challenged from the right. So the Overton window just keeps shifting further to the left. That’s what you get. If you’re too scared to vote Republican or let your friends know you support a Republican, or to consider being a Republican, then you’re on that tide that just keeps shifting out to the left. And where does that wind up? It winds up with Zohran Mamdani.