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Manhattan prosecutors will not be testifying this week in front of a House Republican-controlled committee investigating what they believe is the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement against Donald Trump and his allies.
New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo were set to be grilled by House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan and other GOP lawmakers on July 12, the day after Trump was scheduled to be sentenced for 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Trump’s sentencing date has been postponed by more than two months. A make-up date for prosecutors’ testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has not been scheduled, according to sources familiar with the committee’s plans.
Last week, Trump successfully pushed the judge overseeing his hush money trial in New York to delay his sentencing date after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential “immunity,” giving his lawyers time to prepare arguments that the former president’s conviction should be dismissed on grounds that some of the evidence used at trial should never have been introduced.
Justice Juan Merchan will render a decision on Trump’s arguments on September 6, and Trump will be sentenced on September 18, “if such is still necessary.”
Last month, Bragg’s office told The Independent that he would not be testifying before Trump’s sentencing.
Manhattan voters overwhelmingly elected Bragg as New York County’s district attorney in 2021.
In 2022, he oversaw the conviction of the Trump Organization on charges stemming from a decades-long tax fraud scheme. Trump was not charged in that case. A grand jury indicted the former president in his hush money case in March 2023.
Colangelo, a former federal prosecutor, joined the district attorney’s office in 2022 and was on the team that tried the case against the former president. He delivered opening statements in Trump’s criminal trial and questioned several witnesses, including Trump’s former White House aide Hope Hicks.
The two prosecutors were expected to face a volatile panel of Republican lawmakers who have joined Trump in alleging, without evidence, that the case in New York was under the direction of President Joe Biden’s administration as part of a politically motivated scheme to derail the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 election.
Last month, Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte told Jordan that Colangelo was not “dispatched” to Manhattan to prosecute the Trump case, adding that any “accusations of wrongdoing made without — and in fact contrary to — evidence undermine confidence in the justice system and have contributed to increased threats of violence and attacks on career law enforcement officials and prosecutors.”
Uriarte said there is “no basis” for GOP-fueled accusations of collusion between the Justice Department and Manhattan prosecutors, and that the results of a “comprehensive search” of department messages did not find any evidence of correspondence “regarding any investigation or prosecution of the former president.”
“This is unsurprising,” he wrote. “Our extraordinary efforts to respond to your speculation should put it to rest.”
