DA HIRES EX-JUSTICE OFFICIAL TO AID TRUMP INQUIRY
Attorney also worked on N.Y. investigation of former president
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is hiring a former senior Justice Department official with a history of taking on Donald Trump and his family business as the office seeks to ramp up its investigation into the former president.
The official, Matthew Colangelo, who before he became a top official at the Justice Department led the New York attorney general’s civil inquiry into Trump, is likely to become one of the leaders of the district attorney’s criminal inquiry into the former president.
The hire marks the latest turn in a long-running investigation that has proceeded in fits and starts in recent years. When Bragg took office in January, his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence about Trump’s inflation of his assets to a grand jury.
But Bragg grew concerned about the strength of the case. In February, when he told the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation, Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned, clouding the future of the inquiry.
Bragg insisted that it was continuing, and in recent months, his prosecutors, led by the office’s head of investigations, Susan Hoffinger, have renewed their focus on a hush-money payment to an adult film star who said she had an affair with Trump. Colangelo’s work in the New York Attorney General’s Office may also be relevant in his new job: Manhattan prosecutors have also scrutinized whether the former president illegally inflated the value of his assets, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, looked at the same practices. In September, she filed a lawsuit accusing the former president of overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.
By then, Colangelo was working at the Department of Justice, having been appointed as acting associate attorney general when President Joe Biden took office. In that job, the third highestranking at the department, Colangelo helped oversee the Civil, Civil Rights, Antitrust and Tax divisions, among others.
He stepped aside when a permanent associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, was appointed but continued working as her deputy and supervised lawyers in those divisions.
Colangelo, 48, who also worked in the Obama administration as a senior Labor Department official, will join the District Attorney’s Office as senior counsel. In addition to helping with its “most sensitive and high-profile whitecollar investigations,” he is expected to focus on housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, priorities for Bragg.
“Matthew Colangelo brings a wealth of economic justice experience combined with complex white-collar investigations, and he has the sound judgment and integrity needed to pursue justice against powerful people and institutions when they abuse their power,” Bragg said in a statement confirming the hire.
The U.S. attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement that he had relied on Colangelo’s “wise counsel and excellent judgment” since his first day in the office.
Bragg and Colangelo overlapped while working at the New York Attorney General’s Office, where Bragg rose to become chief deputy attorney general and Colangelo was chief counsel for federal initiatives. In that role, Colangelo led dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, including a successful challenge to the inclusion of a question about citizenship to the census in 2020. He oversaw an investigation into Trump’s charity, the Trump Foundation, which caused the organization to dissolve, and led that office’s civil inquiry into Trump’s financial practices, which resulted in the September lawsuit.
Colangelo also spent seven years working on housing and employment issues at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.