When Donald Trump arrived in a Manhattan courtroom last month to stand trial in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former U.S. president, he barely acknowledged the man who’s been trying to take him down for years.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo is Trump's polar opposite - a slim gray-haired man in a gray suit whose mild manner and steady tone belie the relentlessness with which he has pursued the flamboyant ex-president.

Even as Colangelo laid out his case against the Republican presidential hopeful, reading aloud the shocking details of the 'P****gate' scandal and various alleged schemes to buy the silence of women who say they had affairs with Trump, the wiry, bespectacled prosecutor displayed little emotion.

But Colangelo’s critics say that moment marked a major milestone in his apparent personal crusade to destroy a political enemy.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo speaks during a hearing before former U.S. President Donald Trump's trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, in Manhattan state court in New York City, U.S. March 25, 2024 in this courtroom sketch

A rare public photograph of the low-key prosecutor Matthew Colangelo

In December 2022, Colangelo, the high-flying third most senior official in President Joe Biden's Justice Department, astonished colleagues by packing his bags and leaving for the Big Apple to take a less senior role working for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Colangelo's 'unusual' move was technically a demotion, former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo told DailyMail.com.

'Moving from [The Justice Department] to the Manhattan DA’s office must mean that someone is a true believer,' said Yoo, who served in the George W. Bush administration and now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley.

‘It suggests that the prosecutor here is after the man, Trump, and not the crime,’ said Yoo.

Trump was forced to listen in silence as Colangelo laid out the case

After all, justice is supposed to be blind. And indeed, Colangelo’s career step-down has raised concern.

'Joe Biden's former #3 official at the Department of Justice left DC to help go after President Trump in New York,' wrote Republican Senator Tom Cotton on social media in April as the case began. 

'All the Democrat-led prosecutions of Trump are as concocted as they are political.’

Stranger still is the case that seems to have compelled Colangelo to make such a conspicuous move.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo makes opening arguments as former U.S. President Donald Trump watches with his attorney Todd Blanche before Justice Juan Merchan during Trump's criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, in Manhattan state court in New York City, U.S. April 22, 2024 in this courtroom sketch

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his office are accusing Trump of committing 34 felonies by allegedly falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels and, thus, corrupt the 2016 presidential election.

But what is unclear to many legal experts is if that allegation even constitutes a crime.

Boston University law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman called the prosecution an ‘embarrassment’ for prosecutorial ethics and ‘a historic mistake’ in an opinion article for the New York Times last month. 

He even accused Colangelo of evading ‘specifics about what was actually illegal,’ and gave voice to what many Trump defenders now believe: That the Republican frontrunner is being targeted for prosecution by Democratic political operatives.

Now, as the trial picks up steam and threatens to imperil Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, DailyMail.com reveals new insights into the prosecutor whose career has never strayed far from the beating heart of the Democratic establishment’s anti-Trump legal resistance. 

Trump listens with his lawyer Todd Blanche as Colangelo speaks 

Colangelo, 49, has long maintained a virtually non-existent public profile while quietly rising to great heights in government.

He graduated from Harvard Law and then clerked for Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the U.S. Court of Appeals years before she became a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Colangelo then went to work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as its director of 'economic justice.’

After that he hopped from the Obama Administration Labor Department to the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department and eventually to the Obama White House, where he served as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the National Economic Council.

Then in 2017, his career took a distinctive turn after Donald Trump’s surprise electoral victory against Hillary Clinton.

Colangelo left Washington, D.C., to join New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who was deemed ‘the leader of the Trump resistance’ by Politico and had seemingly reoriented his office for one purpose: Destroying Donald Trump.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo speaks as former U.S. President Donald Trump sits between his attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove and Susan Necheles during a hearing before his trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, in Manhattan state court in New York City, U.S. March 25, 2024 in this courtroom sketch

It was here that Colangelo first worked with future-Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – and it was around this time that Colangelo reportedly started accepting paychecks from the Democratic National Committee, which was being run by his old boss at the Obama Labor Department, Tom Perez.

Colangelo received two payments totaling $12,000 for ‘political consulting’ in 2018, according to a Fox News Digital report.

And as a member of Schneiderman’s team, Colangelo relentlessly pursued dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration on issues from healthcare to civil rights to immigration policy.

He also helped lead an investigation into links between Trump's 2016 campaign and his charity, The Donald J. Trump Foundation. 

That probe resulted in a 2018 agreement in which Trump denied wrongdoing but agreed to dissolve the foundation.

From there, Colangelo plowed straight into Trump's business empire fishing for any irregularities in bookkeeping. 

During that investigation, Colangelo personally quizzed the ex-president’s son Eric Trump in a deposition.

When the junior Trump complained that prosecutors were singling out his father in an act of political sabotage Colangelo snapped at him. 

'I can’t spend the entire day with this sort of obstreperous answer,’ he’s recorded as saying.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg speaks about arrests at university campus protests in New York, Wednesday, May 1, 2024, in New York

Meanwhile, Schneiderman’s career was dramatically flaming out. 

He resigned in May 2018 after four women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault and the New York Times bemoaned that the ‘powerful office at the heart of the Democratic legal resistance could be sidelined and besmirched by scandal.’

Shortly thereafter, Colangelo was back in D.C .and moving up in the world. 

The new Biden Administration tapped him to be Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General, the number three spot in the Justice Department – but, perhaps, after arriving he found the DOJ was less zealous in its pursuit of Donald Trump than he expected.

Most notably, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to bring charges against Trump related to those alleged payment to Stormy Daniels. 

The feds had reportedly concluded that they likely couldn’t prove that Trump intended to break the law – and they closed the matter in the summer of 2019.

Even back in New York, local prosecutors were struggling to make this so-called ‘zombie case’ against Trump that various government lawyers kept animated but not fully alive. 

That was until Colangelo and Alvin Bragg reunited in Manhattan to breathe new life into this Frankenstein’s monster of a prosecution.

Former US President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom at Manhattan criminal court in New York, USA, 02 May 2024

On April 22, Colangelo finally got his chance to go face-to-face with Trump.

Silence fell in the 83-year-old wood-paneled Manhattan courtroom as Trump, his Secret Service detail, 12 jurors and the world's media hung on every carefully chosen word in Colangelo’s opening statement.

'This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a coverup,' he declared in monotone. 'The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.

'Then, he covered up that conspiracy in his business records by lying over and over and over again.' 

Former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney is questioned by prosecutor Matthew Colangelo during former U.S. President Donald Trump's criminal trial

Former President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after exiting court for the day from his hush money trial in New York, Monday, May 6, 2024.

Seated a few feet to his left, Trump sat in silence but outside the courthouse, he has repeatedly said his piece.

'They have absolutely no case,’ Trump said Monday. ‘It's a political hoax, it's election interference.’

Ultimately, seven men and five women on the jury will decide if this resurrected ‘zombie’ case has enough life left in it to secure a conviction.

And as for Colangelo, he seems to have finally gotten his case.