MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin on Thursday accused former President Donald Trump of engaging in “perniciously racist” rhetoric through his allegations that President Joe Biden’s administration played a key role in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution.
Matthew Colangelo, who was Biden’s acting associate attorney general and spent two years in his Department of Justice (DOJ), joined Bragg’s office as senior counsel in December 2022.
However, Rubin on “Morning Joe” argued that Trump’s assertion is “racist” because it implies Bragg lacked the competence to prosecute the former president without guidance from older white people.
Read: Keeping Trump Under Gag Order Likely Violates His, And Americans, Rights: Experts
“If you look at the messaging, both during the trial and thereafter, he is definitely trying to rile up his base with the possibility of some form of term of incarceration,” Rubin said. “And in terms of how he’s talking, he is continuing to push a narrative that, as I’ve written and others have, is extraordinarily dangerous, tying the current president to the prosecution in Manhattan by somehow alleging that the Biden administration, and specifically the Department of Justice, was pulling Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s strings.”
“How? Through a career civil litigator named Matthew Colangelo, who was part of the DA’s team, but certainly not its head. For a variety of reasons, that narrative makes no sense, it is factually false and it’s also dangerously and perniciously racist because it assumes that DA Alvin Bragg, who is black, could not have executed this prosecution on his own without the supervision of a bunch of white elders,” the MSNBC legal analyst concluded.
Trump is currently unable to speak about Colangelo as Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order on him that bars the former president from speaking publicly about prosecutors on the case besides Bragg. The former president has repeatedly characterized the case as “election interference,” referencing it as a “Biden witch hunt” and the “Biden Case.”
Read: Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs: It’s Time To Defund Alvin Bragg’s Office
The Manhattan jury in Bragg’s case convicted Trump in late May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Colangelo delivered opening statements for the prosecution in April, arguing that the former president falsified business records related to the payment as part of a broader initiative to “corrupt the 2016 election.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo said.
Colangelo received $12,000 from the Democratic National Committee in 2018 for “political consulting” in two payments of $6,000 on Jan. 31 of that year, Federal Election Commission records show.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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