The Justice Department says a comprehensive search for communications between department leadership and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office about former President Donald Trump’s hush money case came up empty.

Without evidence, Trump and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly accused President Joe Biden and his Justice Department of colluding in the New York case to hurt Trump politically. Biden and the DOJ have denied any involvement.

Among Republicans’ accusations is that the Justice Department dispatched Matthew Colangelo, a former DOJ official now working in the Manhattan DA’s office, to oversee the prosecution.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on April 30 demanding documents and communications related to Colangelo’s hiring in New York and the Trump investigation there.

“That a former senior Biden Justice Department official is now leading the prosecution of President Biden’s chief political rival only adds to the perception that the Biden Justice Department is politicized and weaponized,” Jordan wrote in the letter.

Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte responded with his own letter to Jordan on Monday. He said the department conducted an extensive search for emails between DOJ leadership and the Manhattan DA’s office about the Trump case from the day Biden was inaugurated until Trump was convicted last month of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. 

“We found none,” Uriaret wrote. “This is unsurprising.”

The assistant attorney general added that the search found no communications between Colangelo and the Manhattan DA’s office during Colangelo’s time with the DOJ, which ended in December 2022. Uriarte insisted the DOJ had nothing to do with Colangelo taking the New York job and that department leaders were unaware he was working on the Trump case until they saw it in news reports.

Uriarte was critical of Jordan’s request. He wrote that the department “does not generally make extensive efforts to rebut conspiratorial speculation, including to avoid the risk of lending it credibility.” But, he added, Garland had vowed to the committee to be transparent. 

Uriarte explained in his letter that the Manhattan DA’s office operates independently of the Justice Department, adding, “The Committee knows this.”

“The self-justifying ‘perception’ asserted by the Committee is completely baseless, but the Committee continues to traffic it widely,” the assistant attorney general wrote.

Uriarte said the only role the Justice Department had in the case was providing, under court order, both the Manhattan DA’s office and Trump’s defense team with documents related to an earlier investigation conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He noted that was already a matter of public record.

Judiciary Committee spokesman Russell Dye told Spectrum News on Tuesday that after receiving the letter, “We are weighing all options as to what comes next.”

In a Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Republican lawmakers pressed Garland about whether his department had assisted in the Trump prosecution. 

Garland called the allegation a “conspiracy theory” that “is an attack on the judicial process itself.”

Asked how Colangelo made his way to the Manhattan DA’s office, the attorney general said: “I assume he applied for a job there and got the job. I can tell you I had nothing to do with it.”