House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan accused the Justice Department of coordinating with New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a “politicized” prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Jordan demanded in a letter recently to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland that Mr. Garland hand over documents and information about Matthew Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official who now is a lead prosecutor for Mr. Bragg in the Trump hush money case.
“Mr. Colangelo’s recent employment history demonstrates his obsession with investigating a person rather than prosecuting a crime,” wrote Mr. Jordan, Ohio Republican. “At the New York Attorney General’s Office, Mr. Colangelo ran investigations into President Trump, leading ’a wave of state litigation against Trump administration policies.’”
The letter detailed Mr. Colangelo’s recent employment history with the Justice Department before he went to New York to work in Mr. Bragg’s office.
The Washington Times reached out to the department for comment but did not immediately hear back.
According to Mr. Jordan, the prosecutor started serving as the acting associate attorney general — the No. 3 official in the department — on Jan. 20, 2021.
From there he served as the principal deputy associate attorney general after the confirmation of Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, but by December 2022, Mr. Bragg hired Mr. Colangelo to “fill the void” left by the departure of government prosecutors Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne.
Mr. Colangelo previously worked as chief counsel for federal initiatives at the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who spearheaded another case against Mr. Trump that claimed that he overvalued his assets to receive better loan agreements.
Mr. Trump was hit with a $464 million civil fraud judgment in that case, which he has appealed.
During Mr. Colangelo’s tenure at the office of Ms. James, he was involved in the investigation into the 2018 Trump Organization prior to his work in Washington as a Justice Department attorney and subsequent return to New York to work under Mr. Bragg.
“Bragg hired Mr. Colangelo to ’jump-start’ his office’s investigation of President Trump, reportedly due to Mr. Colangelo’s ’history of taking on Donald J. Trump and his family business,’” Mr. Jordan said.
Mr. Bragg has charged Mr. Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to his 2016 presidential campaign, in an effort to squelch stories that might have hurt his campaign. Prosecutors are attempting to convince a jury the charges amounted to felonies and not low-level misdemeanors.
Mr. Jordan also noted in his letter that the prosecution’s case relies heavily on the testimony of Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, who later turned against Mr. Trump, when House Democrats, then in the majority, questioned him under oath during the Trump-Russia investigation.
“Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in 2018. In 2019, when he testified before the Democrat-led House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a hearing orchestrated by a longtime Democrat activist to aid their fruitless investigation into President Trump, Cohen lied again — six times,” Mr. Jordan wrote.
“In the years since, Cohen has been vocal about his deeply personal animus toward President Trump,” he added.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.