United States: Republican Jim Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, promised to summon Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and another top prosecutor involved in the hush money case against former President Trump on Friday.
An X post from the Judiciary’s weaponization subcommittee said that Jordan would seek to have both Bragg and District Attorney Matthew Colangelo testify at a June hearing on “the weaponization of the justice system against the former President, Trump.
Charges and Response
It comes as a jury convicted each of the 34 charges that Bragg brought against Trump related to record falsification in an attempt to hide hush money payments that were made to a porn actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Bragg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has declined to engage with Jordan before in the legal case against him, including prior to a charge being filed against him.
At the time, Bragg’s team accused Jordan of coming to the court to interlope and inappropriately meddle in the justice system.
”We will not be threatened by efforts aimed at the sabotage of the justice process, nor will they pressure us into halting any legally correct decision,” a spokesman for Bragg’s office responded when Jordan initially asked for his deposition in March of the previous year.
Even though the judicial proceedings are over, Bragg is likely to refuse to testify since there are other issues in connection with the case. Details such as Trump’s sentencing for the case being July 11, which has also offered his team time to suggest they will be appealing the verdict, might make the prosecutor shy away from his work.
Colangelo’s Background and Legal History
Colangelo, who also represented Trump in his New York case, is also another long-standing adversary of Jordan.
Jordan initially requested information about Colangelo’s employment in April of the previous year, simultaneously beginning another campaign to obtain such documents from the DOJ last month.
Colangelo was a Justice Department official during Biden’s presidency before he was hired by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in December 2022.
He has considerable experience, and—of course, before and after his time at the Department of Justice—he has practiced cases related to Trump.
Before graduating from law school, Colangelo was a part of the political party working at the New York attorney general’s office, where she and her team sued Trump’s charitable organization in 2018 for misappropriation of funds, which effectively shut it down.
Moreover, during the last or the later part of the Trump administration, he was also involved in the office’s investigation of Trump’s own business, the Trump Organization. That probe would later contribute to New York Attorney General Letitia James’s (D) fraud suit, which entailed a $450m penalty on Trump this year.
While Colangelo remained in the bureau, he departed from James’s office for a higher role at the Justice Department but rejoined the bureau two years later to work with Bragg in New York.