Inside Alvin Bragg’s All-Star Prosecution Team

Alvin Bragg is the Manhattan district lawyer. He’s the boss and makes the large selections, and thus has been receiving the majority of the abuse from Donald Trump. However Bragg will probably be solely a passing presence within the courtroom in the course of the former president’s trial on prices of falsifying enterprise data to cowl up a hush cash cost to Stormy Daniels—and even when Bragg exhibits up, he gained’t be talking, both within the courtroom or on the courthouse steps.

As a substitute, the day-to-day weight of pursuing an unprecedented conviction will probably be shouldered by six of Bragg’s high legal professionals. There is no such thing as a official “lead prosecutor” on the crew, and all six have vital duties. But two of the attorneys ought to have particularly outstanding roles—in delivering key statements and in inspecting pivotal, sophisticated witnesses, together with Daniels and Michael Cohen, probably, and maybe even the extremely unstable defendant himself.

The distinction in types and personalities will probably be significantly hanging when Matthew Colangelo is doing the questioning. “No drama,” says pal and former authorized colleague Anurima Bhargava. “He isn’t any individual who ever has an agenda or is on the lookout for a combat. He has a dynamism within the courtroom, nevertheless it’s straightforward and cozy as a result of he’s so nicely ready that he’s ready to soak up lots of info and be extremely clear in explaining it.”

Over the course of his profession, Colangelo, 49, has dealt with a variety of instances, together with a big share of civil rights litigation. However he additionally brings appreciable expertise in Trump-related battles. In 2018, as New York’s government deputy lawyer basic for social justice, Colangelo was central to the investigation of the Trump Basis, which resulted in a $2 million fantastic and an admission from Trump that he had used donations to each bolster his 2016 presidential marketing campaign and repay enterprise money owed. Two years later, Colangelo helped assemble proof that may be used to cost the previous president and the Trump Group with fraud for manipulating the worth of properties, a case that resulted in a $454 million judgment in opposition to Trump in February. In between, Colangelo moved on to the federal Division of Justice, the place he labored for 2 years till Bragg coaxed him again to New York to affix the Manhattan DA’s workplace—a chronology that Trump has used to assault Colangelo as certainly one of President Joe Biden’s “thugs” who’s out to get him.

Trump can’t try to make use of that very same slur in opposition to Susan Hoffinger, nevertheless. The chief of the DA’s investigation division, Hoffinger, 60, comes from a storied Manhattan authorized household. Her father, Jack, was a legendary trial lawyer who cofounded a agency with Susan and her older sister, Fran, a protection lawyer; his son, Adam, was as soon as a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and is now a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig. In non-public apply, Susan Hoffinger defended purchasers accused of every thing from tax fraud to manslaughter; in a earlier stint on the DA’s workplace, she helped bust organized crime rings. “When Alvin Bragg employed her to move the investigation division, I believed that was simply such a wise transfer as a result of she has such an excellent perspective, given the truth that she’s been on either side of the aisle,” says Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former Manhattan prosecutor and present CNN authorized commentator. “She has a manner of pulling out the essence of a degree and making it really necessary and comprehensible to a jury.”

Hoffinger could be an excellent match to guide the essential questioning of Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime lawyer and fixer, who’s a former federal convict himself and possibly not essentially the most simply trusted witness. “Susan is admittedly charismatic,” says Michael Miller, a former colleague of Hoffinger’s within the DA’s workplace. “She relates nicely to jurors as a result of they see a New Yorker like themselves who has an easy manner of coping with people. And her no-nonsense fashion of dealing with witnesses is prone to make each Susan and the witnesses extra credible.”

Each Colangelo and Hoffinger have been concerned in loads of high-stakes, high-profile instances that includes obstreperous defendants; Colangelo, for example, helped pursue a DOJ investigation into Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. “The world will probably be swirling round him, and Matthew simply walks in very calmly and says, ‘Okay, that is what we’ve to do,’” says Roy Austin, a former DOJ colleague. Trump, although, is ready to whip up stronger, nastier winds than most individuals, and he has not been shy about launching private assaults. “Susan is hard and centered,” Miller says, “and might compartmentalize background noise in a serious trial.” For a minimum of the following month, she and Colangelo, in addition to your entire Bragg prosecutorial crew, will want all of the noise-canceling expertise they’ll muster.