Feds Charge NY Attorney General Letitia James with Mortgage Fraud

Prosecutors charged New York State Attorney General Letitia James with three counts of fraud on Thursday, the latest federal case against one of President Trump’s adversaries since he began his second term.

An indictment filed Thursday in Virginia charges James, a Democrat who won a 2023 fraud judgment against Trump, with falsely claiming on loan documents that she intended to live in a Virginia house she purchased in 2020.

James denied wrongdoing and said the case is politically motivated. She said Trump has warped the historically independent U.S. Department of Justice by replacing career prosecutors with inexperienced loyalists.

“These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost,” James said in a statement.

Trump called for James, who was first elected in 2018, to resign over the weekend in a social media post.

“She is a Complete and Total Disaster,” he wrote. Trump said James’s case against him was a “WITCH HUNT.”

Legal groups said the charges fit a disturbing pattern. Federal prosecutors in Virginia last month charged former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress during a 2020 hearing about the bureau’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Comey pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.

The indictment against James was signed by acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, a former White House lawyer with no prosecutorial experience who Trump nominated to replace acting U.S. Attorney Eric Siebert in the eastern district of Virginia. Trump said on social media in September that he fired Siebert for not taking action against James and Comey.

“President Trump’s open interference in the Department of Justice’s investigation — demanding charges, forcing out the prosecutor, and installing a loyalist — is a stunning violation of our country’s long tradition of an independent judicial system,” New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a joint statement with Deirdre Schifeling, a top American Civil Liberties Union executive. “The indictment of Letitia James makes it clearer than ever that President Trump has prioritized retaliation over the rule of law.”

Trump and his allies have said the case was a matter of accountability. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from the North Country and possible GOP candidate for New York governor, said the charges were long overdue.

“For years, Letitia James has illegally weaponized her office to conduct a political witchhunt against Democrats’ political opponents most notably President Donald J. Trump,” Stefanik said. “The charges are specific and damning.”

The case against James began in April when a top Trump administration housing official referred several mortgage documents to criminal prosecutors.. The official said James claimed she intended to occupy the Virginia house as her primary residence.

The five-page indictment released Thursday says James listed the three-bedroom house in Norfolk as a secondary residence in the mortgage documents. Instead, prosecutors said she used it as an investment property that was rented to a family of three.

The alleged miscategorization allowed James to obtain a lower mortgage rate that prosecutors say let her save $18,933 over the life of the loan.

James has said she purchased the home with her niece. In an interview last month on the FAQ NYC podcast, she said the case was based on cherrypicked forms.

“The document that was signed by me in error was a limited power of attorney to my niece, and it was not the basis for determining whether or not my niece and I were eligible for a mortgage,” James said. “In all of the financial documents, I indicated it would not be my primary residence. And so the case is flimsy at best.”

The mortgage case isn’t the only federal probe that James is facing.

Trump housing officials have also accused James of falsely saying her Brooklyn residence has four units on various forms when a 2001 occupancy certificate said it had five units. Ed Martin, who was appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi as a special prosecutor in the case, visited James’s block over the summer.

James has said her property contains four units and the certificate of occupancy in question was filed by a prior owner. The charges handed up Thursday don’t reference the Brooklyn property. It couldn’t be determined how investigations by Martin and Halligan, the prosecutor in the Virginia case, are related.

In addition to the mortgage investigations, federal prosecutors in Albany have sought records about whether James politicized her office in pursuing cases against Trump and the National Rifle Association.

The 2020 case against the NRA centered on improper spending by former executives at the Second Amendment advocacy group. It was registered as a charity in New York and subject to James’s jurisdiction. A jury found two former NRA executives liable for millions in mis-spent organizational funds. The NRA filed for bankruptcy in 2021 and relocated its headquarters to Texas.

James accused Trump in 2022 of systematically inflating the values of his properties — including his gold-plated triplex on Fifth Avenue — to secure more favorable loan terms. A judge in 2024 fined Trump $355 million, but a mid-level appeals court threw out the penalty in August. The case is expected to be decided by the New York State Court of Appeals.

Meanwhile, Democrats rushed to voice support for James.

“If Trump wants to leverage baseless charges to visit political retribution on New York’s Attorney General, he’ll have to go through New Yorkers first,” Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said. “The Attorney General has had our back, time and again. We have hers.”

Story by Jimmy Vielkind/New York Public News Network

Image: New York Attorney General Letitia James delivers remarks in this 2024 file photo. (Credit: Susan Watts/Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office)