On day five of the Trump trial Matthew Colangelo, a former Biden official gives statement

Matthew Colangelo, an ex-Biden Justice Department official, delivered the prosecution’s opening statement on Monday in the Trump criminal trial.

Colangelo a former senior DOJ official who spent years targeting Trump at his previous job.

Bragg didn’t hire Colangelo for his white-collar prosecutorial experience, which was lacking at the time. Instead, he valued Colangelo’s broad knowledge of the Trump Organization, particularly during Bragg’s efforts to ramp up prosecution against Trump. Colangelo previously worked for Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for three years before filing a major civil lawsuit against him and the Trump Organization in late 2022.

During his tenure with Letitia James’s office, Colangelo played a significant role in Trump’s civil case and spearheaded federal initiatives. These efforts included filing lawsuits against the Trump administration and investigating the Trump Foundation.

“This is a witch hunt and it’s a shame and it comes out of Washington,” former President Donald Trump. “It’s in coordination with Washington, everything, including the DA’s office, it’s in coordination with Washington.”

Colangelo’s Democratic Party roots are extensive. He served in the Obama administration as a senior official in the Labor Department and later transitioned to Biden’s DOJ, where he was appointed as acting associate attorney general upon Biden’s inauguration. In this role, as the third-highest-ranking official, Colangelo supervised several divisions, including Civil, Civil Rights, Antitrust, and Tax.