This week, former President Donald Trump launched a tirade against those working behind the scenes on the criminal proceedings brought against him, alleging they were President Joe Biden’s subordinates trying to sabotage the election.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Trump has frequently relied on these lesser-known individuals with significant engagement in his cases to showcase their party loyalties as a means of enticing Biden to seek reelection.
The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush-money case involves two New York officials, whom Trump named on Monday at a press conference. Additionally, Trump has repeatedly accused the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of working with the White House.
Bragg hand-picked Matthew Colangelo, a major prosecutor in the hush-money case, from the Department of Justice in 2022 to work on the “most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations,” and Trump highlighted his worries about him.
“Keep this in mind. It was a DOJ man, Colangelo. “He is a DOJ-Biden man,” Trump declared. “Why is he trying the case in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office? That presents a conflict of its own. He is the one trying to get the case out of the Manhattan DA’s office. That’s what we call a disagreement.
Because Colangelo lacked white-collar prosecution expertise when he entered Bragg’s office, Bragg did not hire him. Rather, at the same time that Bragg was looking to intensify his prosecution of Trump, a story from the New York Times at the end of 2022 stated that Bragg respected Colangelo’s “extensive understanding” of the Trump Organization.
Colangelo had previously worked for Attorney General Letitia James, who looked into Trump for three years before filing a major civil complaint against him and the Trump Organization in the autumn of 2022. This was Colangelo’s most recent employment at the DOJ.
Colangelo spearheaded federal activities while working in James’s office, including pursuing litigation against the Trump administration and looking into the Trump Foundation. He was also involved in Trump’s legal case.
During a hearing on Monday, when Judge Juan Merchan scheduled the case’s trial for April 15, Trump noted that Colangelo was there.
For the past year, Colangelo has been “sitting in the background.” He came clean today because they believe he buffaloed the whole population. The purpose of Colangelo’s appointment to the DOJ was to pursue Trump; today, however, he rose up and assumed total control of the office. “He has been in charge of everything,” Trump remarked.
“I do not see how a trial like this can take place in the midst of a presidential election—remember, this is the Biden trial. Because Colangelo worked for Biden, these are all Biden trials. “Is not it amazing that someone would remove someone from the DOJ and place them in the attorney general’s and Manhattan district attorney’s offices to pursue Trump?”
On Tuesday, the day following Trump’s statements, Merchan imposed a gag order that forbade Trump from discussing Bragg’s prosecutors—including Colangelo—in public. It is now conceivable that Trump will suffer consequences, including penalties, should he express his worries about Colangelo in the future.
In addition, Mark Pomerantz, who was keen to prosecute Trump before Bragg took over at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, was a focus of Trump’s pro bono efforts. Bragg was initially hesitant to file charges against Trump, which caused Pomerantz to step down in the first few months of 2022.
Pomerantz left the position in a fairly public manner and clearly described his problems with the former president in his resignation letter to Bragg, interviews, and his book, People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account. Some have conjectured that Bragg brought up the allegations against Trump in part because of the public pressure that Pomerantz generated.
Trump said that Pomerantz was “Hillary Clinton’s lawyer or the Democrat National Committee’s counsel” and that he was an example of “tremendous corruption” in the hush money case.
Trump claimed, “Nobody has ever seen stuff like that. He swooped in and took over the district attorney’s office to prosecute Trump, and then they would not do what he wanted to do, and then he goes off and publishes a book long before any judgments are made.”
Prior to joining the legal practice of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Pomerantz, who has given to Democrats, organized a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2015 while she was running against Trump.
Additionally, Trump has frequently accused Willis—who is in charge of a Georgia case alleging that he interfered in the election—of collaborating with the White House. He has referenced correspondence she and her now-former special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, exchanged on the subject with members of the Jan. 6 congressional committee and White House staff.
Trump has also played up a Breitbart News allegation in which unnamed sources claimed that Jeff DiSantis, one of Willis’s senior subordinates, was a “Biden plant” who was “the one pulling all the strings” at her office.