House Republicans are threatening to subpoena New York attorney general Letitia James if she does not comply with their request for information about a key prosecutor in former president Donald Trump’s hush-money case.
Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a second letter to James on Tuesday, asking her to provide documents and communications related to Matthew Colangelo’s prior employment at the New York attorney general’s office. Colangelo also worked for the Department of Justice as a senior official before joining Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution against Trump.
Jordan reiterated the request after his initial May 15 letter, which required compliance from the state attorney general by May 29, was met with no response. One day after the deadline, Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to conceal a payment made to a porn star in 2016.
“The Committee is continuing to conduct oversight of politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials,” Jordan wrote in the new letter. James’ press office did not respond to a request for comment.
“Popularly elected prosecutors, such as New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, have engaged in an unprecedented abuse of authority by prosecuting a former President of the United States and current leading candidate for that office,” the Republican congressman added. “Notably, Bragg’s prosecution has been led in part by Mr. Colangelo, a former prosecutor in your office and subsequent senior Justice Department official in the Biden Administration. As such, the Committee continues to seek information and documents related to Mr. Colangelo’s employment at the New York Attorney General’s Office.”
Believing Trump’s hush-money trial to be a “politicized prosecution,” Jordan said in his first letter that the former senior DOJ official has a “history of taking on Donald J. Trump and his family business,” as the New York Times put it. In addition to helping Bragg prosecute Trump, Colangelo previously worked under James while she led a two-year lawsuit against Trump and his real-estate business for manipulating his net worth and inflating the value of his properties.
The former president’s civil-fraud trial concluded in February, with the judge ordering him and co-defendants, including his two adult sons, to pay about $464 million with interest. The final amount was reduced by a New York appeals court. Despite James’s opposition to the deal, the dispute was resolved in April when Trump posted a $175 million bond in place of the full judgment.
Colangelo has worked on other Trump-related matters, filing federal lawsuits against the Trump administration as the third highest-ranking DOJ official and overseeing an investigation into the Trump Foundation while working for James.
“Mr. Colangelo’s recent employment history demonstrates his obsession with investigating a person rather than prosecuting a crime,” Jordan wrote last month.
The listed items requested of James’s office include all internal communications about Trump that Colangelo may have sent to Bragg’s office, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s office, the DOJ, James’ office, the Democratic National Committee, and the Biden campaign. Any personnel files relating to Colangelo’s hiring, employment, and termination at the New York attorney general’s office are to be handed over as well.
James must respond to the latest request by July 2, or else she could face a subpoena. “The Committee is prepared to resort to compulsory process to obtain compliance with our requests,” Jordan wrote on Tuesday.
The congressman also demanded similar records from Colangelo’s other former employer, the DOJ. Responding to that request last week, the DOJ emphatically denied colluding with Bragg in Trump’s criminal prosecution in Manhattan and said it had found no records of email correspondence between Colangelo and Bragg’s office.
The DOJ derided Jordan’s claims of a politically motivated prosecution against Trump as “completely baseless” and “conspiratorial speculation.”
Colangelo and Bragg are set to publicly testify before the House Judiciary Committee on July 12, one day after Trump’s sentencing date. The testimony and sentencing come days ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis., where Trump will be formally nominated as the presidential GOP nominee.