The hush money case against Donald Trump was sold to the public as a local Manhattan matter, a rogue district attorney acting on his own.
But the calendar logs tell a very different story.
And Jim Jordan discovered a smoking gun that exposed this terrifying plot against Trump.
The Man Who Followed Trump From Washington to Manhattan
Matthew Colangelo, who delivered the opening statement in the Manhattan case, joined District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office in December 2022 after resigning as principal deputy associate attorney general, a senior post he held after serving as acting associate attorney general, the third-ranking position in the Biden Justice Department.
That career move raised eyebrows from the start. The prosecutor whose opening statement kicked off the historic trial of former President Donald Trump left a lofty perch in the Biden administration Justice Department for his current comparatively modest New York City job, a career move that legal analysts describe as puzzling and one that prompted questions regarding motivation.
It is not every day that the number three ranking DOJ official, the Acting Associate Attorney General, leaves his post to join a district attorney’s office. People take that kind of step for a reason. And the calendar logs obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by America First Legal suggest the reason had a lot to do with one specific target.
Defenders of Colangelo have long attempted to portray him as only tangentially connected to Trump-related work at the Department of Justice, insisting his portfolio was broader and largely unrelated to the President. Yet calendar entries secured by conservative watchdog America First Legal and shared with the New York Post reveal that he attended multiple key meetings concerning the President before ever setting foot in Bragg’s office.
At least three of those meetings, the records show, dealt directly with the dispute over national security documents stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, the controversy that ultimately led to an indictment by special counsel Jack Smith.
Another dozen calendar entries involve meetings about a subpoena for former White House Counsel Don McGahn, whose testimony was sought on obstruction of justice findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
And it did not stop there. Colangelo also participated in a December 2021 meeting on the DOJ’s position in advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s civil case accusing Trump of sexual abuse and defamation, a matter many conservatives view as part of a broader lawfare campaign against the President.
Mar-a-Lago documents. Don McGahn. E. Jean Carroll. Those are not the calendars of a civil litigator focused on housing policy.
A Political Resume That Keeps Getting Longer
The calendar logs are damaging enough on their own. But Colangelo’s broader political history makes the picture considerably harder to explain away.
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 worked in the DOJ’s civil rights division and served as the chief of staff to then-Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who later served as chair of the DNC in 2017. Perez was DNC chairman at the time Colangelo was paid for “political consulting.”
Before any of that, 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 in the 2020 census. He also 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.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) saw the pattern early. Jordan stated: “District Attorney Bragg’s politicized prosecution of President Trump has serious consequences for federal interests. The fact that a former senior Biden Justice Department official, whose previous employment consisted of leading ‘a wave of state litigation against Trump administration policies,’ 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.”
Jordan also zeroed in on Colangelo’s track record at the New York Attorney General’s office, where Jordan wrote that Colangelo’s “recent employment history demonstrates his obsession with investigating a person rather than prosecuting a crime.” While working at the New York attorney general’s office, Colangelo was part of a team that sued Trump’s charitable organization in 2018, proving it was improperly using funds, which led to its dismantling.
But Bragg’s office had a convenient explanation ready. Bragg’s office had publicly claimed that Colangelo would “focus on housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, as well as the Office’s most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations.” The calendar records suggest that characterization was, at minimum, incomplete.
Garland’s Answer and What It Didn’t Explain
When Congress pressed then-Attorney General Merrick Garland on the move, his answer was one of the more remarkable non-answers in recent memory.
“Do you know how he ended up there?” Gaetz asked. “I assume he applied for a job there and got the job,” Garland answered. A number of GOP lawmakers pointed to the fact that Matthew Colangelo, a former official in Garland’s Justice Department, left to work in the Manhattan DA’s office, including on the Trump case.
“I did not dispatch Mr. Colangelo anywhere,” Garland said. And that was essentially the end of the explanation from the man who ran the Justice Department.
What Garland did not explain is why a man who sat in on meetings about the Mar-a-Lago documents, the McGahn subpoena, and the E. Jean Carroll civil case would then leave the third-ranking post at the Justice Department to take a step down in title at a local district attorney’s office. Career ambition does not usually run downhill.
The May 2024 conviction in Manhattan marked the first time a former US president had been found guilty of criminal charges, even as millions of Americans viewed the case as a politicized attempt to derail Trump’s return to the White House. Judge Juan Merchan ultimately imposed a no-penalty sentence just 10 days before Trump’s second inauguration, waiving any prison time or fines and underscoring how thin the underlying case appeared to many observers.
And the man who built that case walked away without consequence, having spent years targeting one specific individual across multiple offices, multiple jurisdictions, and now, multiple sets of calendar entries that the public was never supposed to see.
Trump himself has not been shy about naming what he sees happening. Trump lashed out at Colangelo directly, charging that the case against him “is all Biden-run things, meaning Biden and his thugs, because I don’t know if he knows he’s alive. And it’s a shame what’s happening to our country.” Trump and his allies have said federal prosecutors are waging a campaign against him to hamper his political prospects.
The permanent Washington establishment has a long history of deciding a President must be stopped and then finding the legal instruments to try to make it happen. The Watergate era showed how career officials and their press allies can work in concert when they share a common target. What the Colangelo calendar logs show is that the same playbook did not retire after Nixon. It just got updated for the 21st century, with a revolving door between federal agencies and local prosecutor offices replacing the anonymous source leaking to the Washington Post.
The question now is whether anyone in a position of authority will actually do something about it, or whether the logs get filed away and forgotten while the people responsible for what millions of Americans view as a selective prosecution of a sitting President move on to their next assignments.
Because if the answer turns out to be nothing, the message sent to every future administration is that this kind of operation, spanning multiple offices and years of coordinated legal pressure against a political opponent, carries zero professional cost.
And that should concern every American, regardless of what they think of Donald Trump.
Sources: New York Post, America First Legal, Fox News Digital, Federal Election Commission filings, House Judiciary Committee, RealClearPolitics, Spectrum News