Alvin Bragg’s Office Drops Charges against Dozens of Columbia Protesters Who Ransacked Campus Hall

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is dropping charges against more than two dozen protesters arrested for ransacking a campus building at Columbia University during the height of its anti-Israel protest encampment.

Manhattan prosecutors said at a court hearing on Thursday that over 3o protesters would not be prosecuted on misdemeanor trespassing charges for storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, according to multiple reports.

Protesters covered the security cameras inside Hamilton Hall when they took control of it, contributing to a lack of evidence showing any identifiable individuals committing property damage, prosecutor Stephen Millan said.

The district attorney’s office offered to drop charges against 13 other protesters if they are not arrested again in the next six months, and none of them accepted the proposal, setting up a return to court next month. Inside the courtroom, some of the protesters covered their faces with masks and keffiyehs, a common practice among demonstrators on college campuses across the country.

The lone remaining defendant from the Hamilton Hall occupation is outside anarchist James Carlson, a scion to an advertising fortune with a long history of agitation. Carlson is being accused of setting an Israeli flag on fire and destroying a police camera in a holding cell following his arrest at Hamilton Hall.

In a viral photograph, a Columbia maintenance man inside Hamilton Hall can be seen pushing Carlson against a wall and grabbing his hoodie. The janitor later said he was simply trying to protect the building when the protesters stormed into it.

The New York Police Department arrested dozens of protesters who occupied the building after weeks of protests inside and around Columbia in opposition to Israel’s war effort against Hamas and U.S. support for it. The movement pushed Columbia to divest from multinational corporations doing business in Israel. No police officers or protesters were seriously injured during the arrests, and students continue to face disciplinary proceedings from Columbia’s administration.

“A group of protesters crossed a new line with the occupation of Hamilton Hall. It was a violent act that put our students at risk, as well as putting the protesters at risk. I walked through the building and saw the damage, which was distressing,” Columbia president Minouche Shafik said in a video message after the arrests.

Shafik received a barrage of criticism during the anti-Israel encampment for the school’s tolerance of the disruptions and extended negotiations with students before the Hamilton Hall occupation.

One of the protest movement’s lead organizers, Khymani James, previously called for Zionists to be killed and was suspended from campus once his comments came to light. The demonstrations were characterized by anti-Israel calls for violence and by antisemitic incidents on and around campus.

Columbia canceled its main campus graduation ceremony because of the anti-Israel disruptions after shifting to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester. The encampment inspired similar protests at elite universities nationwide.

In contrast to his soft-on-crime approach toward the protesters, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and his team of prosecutors secured a conviction last month against former president Donald Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The business-records charges were connected to reimbursements that Trump paid his former attorney, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment he made to porn actress Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Cohen, the trial’s star witness, is a convicted felon for financial crimes and perjury.

Conservatives widely criticized Bragg’s prosecution for relying on a novel legal theory to bypass the statute of limitations and raise the business-records charges to felonies for covering up an underlying crime.

Trump’s sentencing is set to take place next month.