A Manhattan prosecutor heading up the “hush money” case against former President Donald Trump was a political consultant for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2018 — and once donated to Barack Obama.
The DNC paid Matthew Colangelo $12,000 in January 2018 for “political consulting,” Federal Election Commission filings show, and the prosecutor also donated $400 to Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008.
Colangelo, formerly the third-ranking official in President Biden’s Justice Department, joined Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in December 2022 as senior counsel in the criminal case against Trump.
The prosecutor’s paid work for the DNC were first reported by Fox News Digital.
Bragg became the first of several prosecutors to indict the former president for alleged election interference in March 2023, charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records about the “hush money.”
The six-figure payments were allegedly concocted with Trump’s ex-legal fixer, Michael Cohen, to cover up past affairs the then-presidential candidate had with porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
During opening arguments last month, Colangelo told jurors that Trump and Cohen participated in a “criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election,” — even though the case is not federal and the payments to reimburse Cohen weren’t made until after Trump took office in January 2017.
House Republican conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) thundered that the filings were more evidence of a politically motivated prosecution against Trump.
“I just uncovered that the Far Left NYC prosecutor sent from Biden’s DOJ to arrest President Trump was PAID BY THE DNC,” Stefanik posted on X. “This is ILLEGAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
Neither the DNC nor Bragg’s office immediately responded to requests for comment.
Colangelo previously served in the Obama administration as deputy director of the president’s National Economic Council, chief of staff at the Department of Labor and deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
In April 2017, Colangelo also collaborated on an op-ed with then-DNC chair Tom Perez that ripped Trump for tanking efforts to automatically enroll private-sector workers in local government retirement plans.
The piece also accused Senate Republicans of “blowing up two centuries of precedent to ram through” Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in April 2017.
Around the same time, Colangelo authored another op-ed and hosted a forum at Georgetown University knocking the Trump administration’s decision to roll back other Obama-era regulations — including a reversal of Title IX discrimination protections for students based on gender identity.
The Biden administration has since brought that Title IX rule back.
Colangelo went on to serve in the New York State Attorney General’s office, assisting on an investigation of the Trump Foundation and signing on to a lawsuit against Trump’s Commerce Department that opposed adding citizenship questions to the US Census in 2020.
He later briefly ascended to the role of acting associate attorney general under Biden before being appointed principal deputy associate attorney.
Bragg’s office announced in December 2022 that Colangelo was hired to handle “sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations,” among other duties.
Last week, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan demanded records from Colangelo’s time at the Justice Department.
“Since last year, popularly elected prosecutors — who campaigned for office on the promise of prosecuting President Trump — engaged in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former President of the United States and current leading candidate for that office,” Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“That a former senior Biden Justice Department official is now leading the prosecution of President Biden’s chief political rival only adds to the perception that the Biden Justice Department is politicized and weaponized.”
