The New York mayor told the Washington Free Beacon that he hopes Bragg will not once again let arrested Columbia students off the hook
New York City mayor Eric Adams on Friday issued a public call to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg not to drop prosecutions against students arrested at Columbia University after storming the school’s Butler Library earlier in May.
Two security guards suffered injuries during the storming of the building in which Hamas-supporting student activists handed out literature to classmates attempting to study for finals.
“I think the DA going forward with these charges is very important to discourage people from carrying out these actions, when you break into a dorm building, when you destroy property, when you harass students and menace them, we need to move forward in a very aggressive fashion to send a strong, loud message that this is not going to be tolerable,” Adams told the Washington Free Beacon during a phone interview after a cryptocurrency conference in Las Vegas.
Bragg, a far-left progressive with strong financial backing from George Soros’s political network, is part of a slew of big-city prosecutors who largely decline to prosecute all but the most serious crimes in favor of “restorative justice” approaches. The district attorney’s office in 2024 dismissed dozens of cases related to a similar violent takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.
Bragg has explicitly sought to “limit youth in adult court.” He wrote in a 2022 memo that, because brain development continues into a person’s mid-20s, “prosecuting youth in our adult criminal court system can lead to recidivism.”
Adams made clear that he disagrees with Bragg’s attitude toward crime and does not want to see a repeat of the 2024 Hamilton Hall fiasco.
“I think that with some of the protests here in this city and with some of the repeat offenders, the penalty is not matching the actions,” he said. “I want these cases to move forward as they are.”
While an attorney for the students requested that the cases be dismissed, Bragg’s office has signaled it intends to pursue the cases—at least for now.
Adams faces an uphill battle for reelection this year even after the Trump administration instructed prosecutors to drop federal charges of bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations (notably in the form of alleged Turkish Airlines upgrades).
Adams has worked closely with President Donald Trump and his team since the Department of Justice dismissed his case. He met with DOJ civil rights official Leo Terrell earlier this week to discuss areas of cooperation between the municipal and federal governments.
The New York City Police Department, the mayor told the Free Beacon, is now “cooperating 100 percent” with the DOJ on the issue of anti-Semitism.
“One of the things that’s very important is utilizing the power of the federal government and [Terrell’s] office to go after those who are committing these levels of anti-Semitism,” Adams said. “To look at what cases the federal government can pick up to deal with civil rights violations, and see how do we increase the penalty of such.”
Bragg’s office did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
