WATCH: Trump Org Prosecutor Pressed About Trump’s Personal Taxes — Says ‘We Are Following The Facts Wherever They Take Us’

CBS News anchor John Dickerson asked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to explain how it is that former President Donald Trump’s personal taxes could possibly be “pristine” when his company’s practices resulted in 17 fraud convictions.

Dickerson interviewed DA Bragg, the prosecutor who just secured 17 criminal fraud convictions against the Trump Organization, on Tuesday night’s edition of CBS News Prime Time with John Dickerson.

Bragg explained at length why Trump himself was not charged in that case, but pushed back when Dickerson referenced “reporting” that he’d “decided not to look into” Trump personally:

JOHN DICKERSON: Let me ask about efforts by former President Trump when he was the head of the Trump Organization to inflate the value of that company. And that was apparently something your predecessor was looking at. You decided not to look at it according to reporting. That’s something that the attorney general of New York is looking at. So, I wonder if now that you’ve been in the job a little bit longer and this other case is now had a verdict, might you be looking into that again, that idea of President- former President Trump inflating the values of his assets?

ALVIN BRAGG: I love how you said, according to reporting, it’s the way in my business we always say “allegedly” to caveat the scope and the reach of the statement. So, look, we’ve consistently said that, as we did last week, we’re going to do our talking in the courtroom. You know, I’ve been a prosecutor for 20 years. There’s things that we do behind the scenes. We don’t want to prejudice any investigation we’d bring. And so, we’ve been consistently sort of pointing people back to the statement in April, which is that we decided not to bring any charges at that time so that we could continue our investigation, which is what we’re doing.

Dickerson went on to ask about Trump’s personal taxes, and Bragg delivered one of those Rorschach test answers that are either ominous or being read into too much, depending on your point of view:

JOHN DICKERSON: Here’s a question I don’t get. So, the Trump Organization, you looked at their taxes and you said, successfully, you said they weren’t playing by the rules of- of taxes. You have President- former President Trump’s personal taxes. It seems hard to believe that a company where the president, sorry, where the leader of the company knew that they were engaged in tax practices that were not legal would have pristine, crystal-clear personal taxes. Is that a- that seems- that seems impossible, that that would be the case.

ALVIN BRAGG: So, we- we are investigating and it’s interesting because you started with a couple of things report that we’re investigating and now you’ve added to the list. This is- this is- this is what we do in the office. Right. This is what we do in complex investigations. We go where the facts take us. You know, it takes time. And we don’t want to prejudice any- any potential result by speaking publicly. But we are following the facts wherever they take us.

Watch above via CBS News Prime Time with John Dickerson.

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