Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo — who has long been the focus of Trump’s ire, before and after Judge Juan Merchan issued a gag order — is a longtime public servant and civil litigator.
But his tenure of less than two years at the DOJ at the beginning of the Biden administration and its subsequent move to Alvin BragaHis office became the sole base for what Justice Department leaders called “conspiratorial speculation” – largely fueled by Trump himself – that Biden engineered Trump’s conviction in Manhattan. Republican Party leaders are so enamored with this narrative that Chief Justice Jim Jordan requested that Bragg and Colangelo testify before Congress, and they agreed to testify July 12th (the day after Trump’s sentence). But even before that hearing, 80% of registered Republican voters already to believe that narrative, according to the CBS News/YouGov poll released Monday.
And the notion that Biden is pulling Bragg’s strings, with or without Colangelo, is both demonstrably false and perniciously racist.
After Biden’s inauguration, Colangelo — like dozens of other experienced lawyers — served as a surrogate for the political candidate, whom he would eventually serve as deputy. Specifically, he was temporarily acting associate attorney general and, after Vanita Gupta was confirmed, he was his top deputy until he left the Department of Justice in early December 2022.
The idea that Colangelo came close to criminal law is bizarre and unfounded. Why? The very nature of the Associate Attorney General’s job is to oversee all civilian units and some of the policy/community-oriented units within the DOJ (e.g., the Office on Violence Against Women, the Office for Access to Justice, the COPS program) , but not criminals, like a Justice Department organizational chart reflects. In fact, a letter to Jordan issued on Monday by the department’s Office of Legislative Affairs reinforces that Colangelo’s work was to “supervise the components of civil litigation who report to the Associate [Attorney General’s] office.” Simply put, he did not oversee any work of the criminal or national security divisions.
In fact, Colangelo operated so far removed from the DOJ’s criminal work that a colleague recalls his exclusion from conversations about the Trump investigations and therefore believes that Colangelo did not even “tangentially know” about any Trump investigations or prosecutions, beyond than what was known to the public. Anthony Coley, who was Attorney General Merrick Garland’s top spokesman until early 2023, attended the AG’s senior staff daily meeting every day alongside about seven other people, including Colangelo. Coley recalls that whenever Garland briefed the press on the various criminal investigations of Trump, Gupta and Colangelo leave the room. (Coley emphasized that such conversations stopped occurring after special counsel Jack Smith was appointed.) Coley also told me that these “simple” meetings were planned, as Garland operated strictly on a need-to-know basis.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Justice Department letter informs Jordan and colleagues that “a comprehensive search of email communications from January 20, 2021, to the date of [Trump] verdict, among any officials in the leadership of the Department, including all political appointees in those positions, and the district attorney’s office regarding any investigation or prosecution of the former president” resulted in “none.”
How, then, did Colangelo end up on Bragg’s team if he has historically been a civil lawyer? For starters, a source who knows Colangelo told me that although he previously worked in the DOJ’s civil rights division during the Obama administration, he never intended to stay at Biden’s Justice Department for long, as evidenced by the fact that when he accepted the Washington position after years in the New York Attorney General’s Office, his family stayed in New York.
The opportunity to join Bragg’s team came about because Colangelo and Bragg were friends from their time together in the attorney general’s office, where Colangelo became something of an expert on Trump World. First, under Bragg supervisionHe worked the case against the Trump Foundation, in which the attorney general alleged that Trump and his children improperly used charitable funds to benefit his 2016 campaign and to pay off business debts. Following a “long legal battle”In late 2019, a court order not only forced the foundation to distribute $2 million to various charities, but a settlement led to the foundation closing entirely. Both events were seen as victories for Attorney General Letitia James and her team.
Colangelo then worked in the investigative phase of what became Trump civil fraud case, I tried it last fall. In both cases, he became an expert on the characteristics, operations and documentation of the Trump Organization. But Colangelo was never the driving force of the criminal case; in fact, as was publicly disclosed, at the time Colangelo joined Bragg’s team in December. 5, 2022, plans to convene a grand jury in the prosecutor’s criminal case had been in the works for months. The accusation occurred four months later.
In announcing Bragg and Colangelo’s decision to testify voluntarily next month, a spokesperson for the district attorney said, “It undermines the rule of law to spread dangerous misinformation, unsubstantiated allegations and conspiracy theories following the jury’s return of a conviction for complete crime in People versus Trump.” And that’s especially true when it comes to Trump and his allies’ obsession with Colangelo. There is nothing about his work for the DOJ, the access that came with it, or his past to support the personal attacks against him — or the baseless claim that he was the conduit through which Biden planned and controlled Bragg’s case. .
Will this stop Trump, Jordan and their allies? Do not count on it.
This article was originally published in MSNBC.com
