A prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is attracting waves of criticism after he successfully helped secure a felony conviction against former President Donald Trump this week.
Matthew Colangelo, once the No. 3 official in the Biden administration Department of Justice, was one of a handful of prosecutors District Attorney Alvin Bragg enlisted to bring charges against Trump over a 2016 hush money payment.
Colangelo delivered the opening statement at the historic trial, telling jurors Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election; then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
In March, before Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order on Trump that prevented him from talking about prosecutors, Trump assailed Colangelo in remarks to the press.
“Remember this. Colangelo was a DOJ guy. He’s a Biden DOJ guy,” Trump said. “Why is he in the Manhattan DA’s office trying the case? That in itself is a conflict.”
Bragg plucked Colangelo from his top post at the DOJ to help with white-collar prosecutions in December 2022. Colangelo had little experience in that field, but he did have a wealth of knowledge about Trump.
Before working at the DOJ, Colangelo worked for Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for three years before bringing a massive civil lawsuit against him and the Trump Organization in the fall of 2022.
During his time in James’s office, Colangelo was involved in Trump’s civil case and also led federal initiatives, which involved, at the time, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, as well as investigating the Trump Foundation.
He also previously worked in the Obama administration, and the Democratic National Committee paid him twice for “political consulting” in 2018, federal records show.
One source involved with Trump’s legal proceedings described Colangelo as “exhibit A” of the perceived coordination between the Biden administration and Bragg’s office.
“I think the timeline is really important,” the source told the Washington Examiner. “He’s in one of the premier legal posts in America, and he suddenly quits his job, goes to become a line prosecutor in the New York DA’s office, and then almost immediately thereafter, the zombie case comes back to life.”
Trump allies have zeroed in on Colangelo as a means to showcase what they view as an unfairly politicized prosecution against Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
House Republicans, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), asked Bragg and Colangelo on Friday to appear for a public hearing to testify on the Trump case in June. It remains to be seen whether the pair will accept the invite, and Bragg’s office did not respond to a request for comment about it.
Article III Project founder Mike Davis, an ardent Trump supporter, called Trump’s prosecution “rigged,” in part because of Colangelo.
“You have … Matthew Colangelo getting deployed as a senior political appointee in the Biden Justice Department to resurrect the zombie case that the prior Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, the Manhattan U.S. attorney, the Federal Election Commission, Bragg himself declined to bring until they brought this case to directly interfere in the 2024 presidential election,” Davis said.
When Bragg took office in early 2022, he was reluctant to continue his predecessor Cy Vance’s investigative work of Trump. However, after months of public pressure and the hiring of Colangelo, Bragg charged Trump in April 2023. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Federal Election Commission both previously declined to charge Trump over the hush money payment.
Many of Trump’s critics have criticized the accusation that the prosecution was political rather than sincere. They have pointed to how common falsifying business records charges are in New York City and repeated the adage that prosecutors do not bring cases they do not believe they can win.
Manhattan is the “financial capital of the world,” defense attorney Joey Jackson, who once worked in the Manhattan DA’s Office, told reporters on Friday.
Jackson said the office has been “interested in white-collar crime since the beginning of time.”
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“You can call this, as has been said, a Biden prosecution, a corrupt judge, a corrupt DA,” Jackson said. “This was about a crime that the DA office had a lot of interest in, and ultimately they pursued that interest and they got a guilty verdict, and I think that was a just and appropriate result.”
Colangelo did not respond to a request for comment.
