Embattled New York Attorney General Letitia James was indicted Thursday in Alexandria, Va. James has been under investigation since May for mortgage fraud.
“James was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on one count after a mortgage fraud investigation, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter,” the Associated Press reported. “James’ office had no immediate comment Thursday.”
The James case remained under seal Thursday, making it impossible to assess what evidence prosecutors have. But as was the case with the Comey charges, the prosecution followed a strikingly unconventional case. The Trump administration two weeks ago pushed out Erik Siebert, the veteran prosecutor who had overseen the investigation for months but had resisted pressure to file a case, and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who was once Trump’s personal lawyer but who has never worked as a federal prosecutor.
Mainstream media outlets have been desperately trying to paint the investigation of Letitia James as being vengeance for her lawfare efforts against Trump last year. But James ran for attorney general on a platform of going after the president, and she delivered, pushing blatantly partisan “fraud” charges that weren’t fraud at all. She accused Trump of inflating property values to secure favorable loans, but as Shark Tank star and entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary pointed out last year, this is standard practice in real estate. Banks don’t simply accept a developer’s numbers; they conduct their own evaluations. In fact, the banks involved testified they suffered no losses and continued doing business with Trump.
"When you get a developer that builds a building and he says it's worth 400 million, and he wants to borrow 200 million from a bank, which happens every day everywhere on Earth, including every American city — every developer is an entrepreneur, they shine the light on their building, and they say it's worth 400. The bank does its own due diligence — as was done in this case, because they're very good at it, the banks are very good — and they say no, it's worth 300, we're only going to loan you 150 million. That haggling has gone on for decades, that's how it works," O'Leary said.
O'Leary continued, "And then, in this case, even the bank that was supposedly defrauded, testified and said we didn't lose anything. We want to do business with this guy again, we'd like to, but the judge said, 'No, no, no, no, no, no, let's penalize this developer for $355 million. And if we're going to do that, let's penalize all the developers all across America. They've all done the same thing. All of them should go to jail and we should stop building buildings.' That's what the message is from New York. Even the governor herself is concerned about what this looks like to investors all around the world. It's not just U.S. domestic. All around the world, people are talking about what happened here. You really think people want to invest money in New York after this?"
James pressed ahead with her bogus case, demanding $355 million in penalties for what was essentially a victimless crime. The fine eventually ballooned to over $500 million with interest before an appeals court tossed it. Even CNN’s top legal analyst, Elie Honig, called the case “bogus,” highlighting the absurdity of pursuing civil penalties when no one was actually harmed. “The core reason for that ruling, according to the judges, is essentially that there was not enough of a showing here that there were actual victims,” Honig explained.
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