{"id":2623,"date":"2025-10-15T00:01:20","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T00:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/2623\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T00:01:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T00:01:20","slug":"the-indictment-of-letitia-james-and-the-collapse-of-impartial-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/2623\/","title":{"rendered":"The Indictment of Letitia James and the Collapse of Impartial Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOne tier of justice for all Americans,\u201d the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote<\/a> Thursday on X, shortly after a federal grand jury in Virginia indicted the New York attorney general, Letitia James, on charges of bank fraud and making false statements. Bondi had made a similar point, two weeks before, after the indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey<\/a>. \u201cNo one is above the law,\u201d she proclaimed. This self-satisfied triumphalism misconstrues the danger posed by the prosecutions of James and Comey\u2014and by the other cases that President Donald Trump<\/a> has demanded be brought against his perceived political enemies, which may soon follow. The issue here, contrary to the Administration\u2019s framing, is not that these individuals had previously evaded accountability for allegedly criminal activity. (Those worried about the powerful being able to skirt the law should refer to Trump v. United States<\/a>, in which the Supreme Court granted Presidents near-complete immunity<\/a> from criminal prosecution for official acts. Some people, it turns out, actually are above the law.) Rather, the problem with the Trump-directed prosecutions is about a different, and even more pernicious, form of unequal treatment: that this Administration will use the justice system to selectively punish those who incur the President\u2019s wrath. The essence of impartial justice is treating like conduct alike\u2014not identifying the target and then finding the crime.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s supporters often insist that Democrats, including James, weaponized the justice system against him first. Indeed, James, while running for attorney general back in 2018, had some intemperate and ill-advised words for Trump. \u201cI will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate President,\u201d she vowed. After she was elected, her statements were even more pointed, and even more arguably improper for a law-enforcement official: \u201cAs the next attorney general of his home state, I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real-estate dealings.\u201d In office, James delivered. She brought a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, his children, and his company, accusing them of having inflated the value of their properties to lenders and insurers in order to obtain more favorable terms. The judge who heard the case, Arthur Engoron, sided with James. \u201cThe frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,\u201d he wrote in his decision, imposing a fine that, with interest, grew to more than half a billion dollars. (In August, a divided appeals court ruled that the penalty was excessive, but let the fraud conviction stand so that it could be reviewed by a higher court.)<\/p>\n

More to the point, even if James misused her office to go after Trump, the acceptable reaction is not to repeat that offense. Trump may be a self-described counterpuncher, but payback has no place in the \u201cPrinciples of Federal Prosecution,\u201d the bible that governs how federal prosecutors should conduct themselves. And so the question raised by the indictment of James is: would any other federal prosecutor have brought this case against any other defendant? The indictment is, like the Comey charges, notably lacking in detail\u2014but the answer seems to be a resounding no.<\/p>\n

Given that Trump had publicly demanded that James be prosecuted, her indictment was hardly unexpected. The precise fraud alleged, however, was a surprise. In April, Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent the Department of Justice a \u201ccriminal referral\u201d that cited James\u2019s 2023 purchase of a house in Norfolk, Virginia. James, Pulte charged, had said on one form that the property would be her \u201cprimary residence,\u201d though it was actually for her niece\u2014a fact that James had stated elsewhere. Instead, the indictment focussed on James\u2019s purchase of another house in Norfolk in 2020, for a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars. In the process of buying this other property, James had signed a \u201csecond-home rider\u201d that, according to the indictment, required her \u201cto occupy and use the property as her secondary residence.\u201d The rider itself, containing standard language from Fannie Mae, stipulated that James would \u201ckeep the Property available primarily as a residence for Borrower\u2019s personal use and enjoyment for at least one year.\u201d<\/p>\n

The indictment alleges that James did not use the property as her second home; instead, it asserts, she rented the house to a family of three, although it does not provide specifics. It also states that James\u2019s application for homeowner\u2019s insurance described the property as \u201cowner-occupied,\u201d even though her federal tax forms treated it as \u201crental real estate.\u201d By obtaining the mortgage for a second home rather than for an investment, according to the indictment, James was able to borrow at a lower rate (three per cent as opposed to 3.815 per cent) and receive a larger seller credit. This \u201cscheme and artifice to defraud\u201d lenders \u201cby means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises\u201d resulted in nearly nineteen thousand dollars in \u201cill-gotten gains\u201d over the life of the loan, the indictment alleges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOne tier of justice for all Americans,\u201d the U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, wrote Thursday on X, shortly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[393,153,396,397,9,11,10,49,51,50,418],"class_list":{"0":"post-2623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-attorney-general","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-fraud","11":"tag-indictment","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-headlines","14":"tag-new-york-news","15":"tag-new-york-state","16":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","17":"tag-new-york-state-news","18":"tag-virginia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}