Former President Donald Trump railed against officials working behind the scenes on the criminal cases against him this week, claiming they were deputies of President Joe Biden who were attempting to interfere with the presidential election.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly looked to these officials, who have lesser-known names but heavy involvement in his cases, to highlight their partisan affiliations as incentives to help Biden win reelection.
Trump did this Monday at a press conference by naming two New York officials who are or were involved with the hush-money case brought by Manhattan District Alvin Bragg, and Trump has frequently accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office of coordinating with the White House as well.
Trump emphasized his concerns about Matthew Colangelo, a lead prosecutor in the hush-money case whom Bragg hand-picked from the Department of Justice in 2022 to work on, according to Bragg, the “most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations.”
“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. He’s in the Manhattan DA’s office trying the case. I mean, that’s called a conflict.”
Bragg did not hire Colangelo for his white-collar prosecutorial experience, which was lacking at the time he joined Bragg’s office. Rather, Bragg valued Colangelo’s “broad knowledge” of the Trump Organization, according to a New York Times report published at the end of 2022, during the same time frame that Bragg was seeking to ramp up his prosecution efforts against Trump.
Before his most recent stint at the DOJ, Colangelo had worked for Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for three years before bringing a massive civil lawsuit against Trump 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.
Trump observed that Colangelo was present during a hearing on Monday when Judge Juan Merchan set the trial in the case to begin April 15.
Colangelo has been “sitting in the background for the last year. Today he went right up front because they figure he buffaloed the whole public. … Colangelo from the DOJ was put there to go after Trump, and today he stood up and he took over the whole office. He’s been running the whole thing,” Trump said.
“I don’t know how you can have a trial like this in the middle of an election, the presidential election, and this is, again, this is a Biden trial. These are all Biden trials because Colangelo worked for Biden,” Trump continued. “Can you imagine they take a guy out of DOJ, and they put him into the attorney general’s office and then into the Manhattan DA’s office To go after Trump?”
On Tuesday, one day after Trump’s remarks, Merchan issued a gag order that prohibited Trump from publicly speaking about Bragg’s prosecutors, including Colangelo. Trump will now likely face repercussions, such as fines, if he voices his concerns about Colangelo in the future.
Trump also targeted Mark Pomerantz, who was working pro bono in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and eager to prosecute Trump before Bragg took over the office. Bragg was initially hesitant to bring charges against Trump, leading Pomerantz to resign in early 2022.
Pomerantz has been highly public about his exit from the office and has vividly detailed his grievances with the former president in his resignation letter to Bragg, media appearances, and a book he authored called People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account. Some have speculated that Bragg revived charges against Trump partly as a result of public pressure created by Pomerantz.
Trump said Pomerantz was an example of “tremendous corruption” in the hush money case and that he was “Hillary Clinton’s lawyer or Democrat National Committee’s lawyer.”
“He walked in and he took over the district attorney’s office — nobody’s ever seen things like that — to prosecute Trump, and then they wouldn’t do what he wanted to do, and then he goes out and he writes a book long before any decisions were made,” Trump said.
Pomerantz, who has donated to Democrats, previously worked at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton during her campaign against Trump in 2015.
Trump has also repeatedly accused Willis, who is leading an election interference case against Trump in Georgia, of working in coordination with the White House. He has cited communication she and her now-former special prosecutor Nathan Wade had with White House officials and Jan. 6 committee members in Congress related to the case.
Trump has also elevated a report published by Breitbart News in which anonymous sources accused one of Willis’s top deputies, Jeff DiSantis, of working in her office as a “Biden plant” who was “the one pulling all the strings.”
DiSantis did not respond to a request for comment on the accusation.
DiSantis has been involved in Democratic politics for roughly three decades. In a 2019 interview with his alma mater, the University of Georgia, DiSantis detailed for two hours how entrenched he was in Democratic campaigns, primarily in Georgia but also nationally. He is also the co-founder of a Democratic consulting firm and helped Willis win her district attorney campaign before working for her.
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Trump said on Monday that the “lawfare” waged against him in the two state cases, as well as the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, were all “done by the Democrat Party.”
“This is all done by the Democrat Party, and it’s all done by Biden and his group. I don’t know if it’s Biden because I don’t know if Biden is even sharp enough. I don’t even know if Biden knows what’s happening if you want to know the truth. Maybe he does. He probably does,” Trump said. “But this is all done by Biden and the thugs that work for Biden, and it’s a very bad thing. It’s a very dangerous thing for our country.
