(NEW YORK) — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Monday that his office has hired former Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo as senior counsel.
Colangelo served in the Department of Justice and, before that, in the New York attorney general’s office, where he was part of the team that investigated the Trump Foundation, former president Donald Trump’s now-defunct charity arm.
Colangelo also led the NYAG’s opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census.
At the district attorney’s office, Bragg said Colangelo will focus on cases, policies and strategies in the areas of housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, and will work on “the office’s most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations.”
The Manhattan DA’s office has said it is continuing its criminal investigation into Trump and his business practices. Trump’s namesake real estate company, the Trump Organization, is currently on trial in Manhattan for criminal tax fraud.
The DA’s wider investigation appeared dormant at the start of the year when the two senior prosecutors leading the probe resigned after Bragg reversed course regarding his office moving forward on a possible indictment of Trump.
But in recent months, the DA’s office has revisited an early focus of the investigation: the hush-money paid in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, the adult film performer who claimed a long-denied affair with Trump, sources familiar with the matter have told ABC News. Details of the probe’s new focus were first reported by the New York Times.
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