House Republicans have summoned top Manhattan prosecutors to testify before lawmakers following the unprecedented felony conviction of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
On Friday, the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government issued a demand for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his deputy, Matthew Colangelo, to appear on Capitol Hill for a June 13 hearing.
#BREAKING: @Jim_Jordan will demand Alvin Bragg and Matthew Colangelo to appear for hearing on June 13, 2024 to testify about the unprecedented political prosecution of President Trump.
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) May 31, 2024
The demand comes the morning after former President Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over 2016 payments to an attorney marked as “legal expenses.” Trump faces four years behind bars for each count with sentencing scheduled on July 11, just four days before the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.
Bragg ran for the top New York County prosecutor’s office on a platform to prosecute Trump in 2021.
“Bragg often reminded voters on the campaign trail that he helped sue the Trump administration ‘more than a hundred times’ as a deputy in the New York state attorney general’s office,” Reuters reported the year Bragg was elected.
The Manhattan DA was the first to unveil an unprecedented indictment of a former president last year when the prosecutor handed down 34 counts related to payments to keep pornographer Stormy Daniels quiet about an alleged affair amid the 2016 presidential race. The case pursued by Bragg was previously declined by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, and prosecutors who worked under Bragg’s predecessor.
Colangelo was previously the no. 3 official in the Justice Department, and he joined Bragg’s team at the local prosecutor’s office in December 2022 as the Manhattan attorneys prepared to indict Trump. Colangelo had also worked at the New York State Attorney General’s Office, which sought to bankrupt the former president in another politicized investigation. House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee wrote a letter to New York Democrat Attorney General Letitia James two weeks ago demanding records related to Colangelo’s time there.
“Mr. Colangelo’s recent employment history demonstrates his obsession with investigating a person rather than prosecuting a crime,” wrote Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
President Trump’s campaign reported an overwhelming surge in small-dollar donations immediately following the New York conviction. The WinRed fundraising platform even crashed over the spike in traffic as Americans flooded the website with contributions. The Trump campaign reported more than $35 million raised upon the guilty verdict.
Trump, meanwhile, faces three more criminal trials ahead of the November election as Democrats seek to thwart their top political challenger with an unprecedented lawfare campaign. The trio of cases are facing delays, however, rendering it uncertain whether the president will stand trial in any of them before Election Day.
In Florida, the federal judge overseeing the classified documents paused litigation after prosecutors admitted to tampering with evidence. In Georgia, Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis is facing an appeal to remove her from the case over accusations of corruption, and in Washington, D.C., the judge in Trump’s Jan. 6 case must wait for the Supreme Court to rule on the extent of the DOJ’s authority to bring certain charges.
