Former President Donald Trump‘s MAGA narrative purveyors have broadened their attacks on the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg‘s team, taking aim at Senior Counsel to the DA Matthew Colangelo, whose opening statement in Trump’s hush money trial included the assertion that the former President had committed “fraud, pure and simple.”
Trump’s attack line on DA Bragg has been to claim that the District Attorney’s focus on Trump’s alleged crimes is part of a witch hunt by the Left, made all the more egregious, Trump claims, because Bragg, he says, has neglected other NYC crimes to pursue the former President.
But with the public appearance of more of Bragg’s team, including Colangelo, Trump’s attack has broadened. Claiming that each case against him is an attempt at election interference by “crooked Joe Biden” — a phrase the Trump team repeats ad nauseum — the Trump defenders hope to link his prosecutions to the Biden administration. Matthew Colangelo was once a high-ranking attorney at the Department of Justice — and Trump’s team claims he left that position only for the chance to prosecute Trump.
“Joe Biden’s former No. 3 official at the Department of Justice left D.C. to help go after President Trump in New York,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told Axios, pushing the Biden link. (Axios also reported that DOJ officials leaving for New York is “not unusual.”)
Joe Biden’s former #3 official at the Department of Justice left DC to help go after President Trump in New York.
All the Democrat-led prosecutions of Trump are as concocted as they are political. https://t.co/4KoeR586EX
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) April 22, 2024
Colangelo was introduced as a Bragg hire in December of 2022 after spending two years at the Justice Department. Noting the move, the DA’s office cited Colangelo’s experience in, among other specialties, “complex white-collar crime investigations” — of New York, being the nation’s de facto financial capital, has an abundance.
[Bragg did not announce his 34-count felony indictment of Trump until April 2023.]
Colangelo worked with Bragg at the New York Attorney General’s office before his time in Washington and he had also gone after Trump before, having previously investigated the Trump Foundation, which was forced to shut down after it was found to have engaged in an “egregious pattern of illegality.”
Colangelo’s interest in investigating Trump predates his stint at the DOJ, which takes some of the bite out of Trump’s accusation that Colangelo is a left-wing operative sent by Biden to persecute him. But the narrative that Colangelo is an agent of “Biden’s DOJ” will continue to be pushed, and it will find a willing audience among MAGA supporters of the former President.