Copyright The New York Times
Lawyers for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, began a high-stakes effort on Friday to convince a federal judge to dismiss the criminal case against her, calling it a “flagrantly unconstitutional” prosecution fueled solely by President Trump’s animus. The argument came in a motion that included a laundry list of statements that Mr. Trump has made about Ms. James over the past six years. The motion argued that the Justice Department’s criminal prosecution of Ms. James on bank fraud charges was the culmination of a longstanding and intensive campaign that the president mounted against her after she investigated and sued him, accusing him of inflating his net worth for financial gain. “Prosecutors seldom provide defendants with a ‘smoking gun’ that spells out their improper motivations,” wrote Abbe D. Lowell and Andrew Bosse, lawyers for Ms. James. “But here, the executive has shouted six years of direct evidence of genuine animus through a megaphone.” In September, Mr. Trump ordered the Justice Department to prosecute three of his adversaries, including Ms. James and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. The demand came shortly after Mr. Trump pushed out the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to install a handpicked prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to the president. Ms. Halligan swiftly brought cases against Mr. Comey and Ms. James. She persuaded a grand jury to charge Ms. James with bank fraud and false statements to a financial institution related to a house that the attorney general purchased in 2020 in Norfolk, Va. Prosecutors have accused Ms. James of intentionally misleading financial institutions as to why she was purchasing the property, suggesting that it would be a second residence but in fact using it as a “rental investment property” and reporting that she had collected “thousand(s) of dollars in rent.” Ms. James, who pleaded not guilty last month, has called the charges baseless. The New York Times reported that the property has long been occupied by Ms. James’s great-niece, who testified before a grand jury that she did not pay rent, and that Ms. James has only ever reported receiving $1,350 in rent. Ms. James did, however, refer to the house as an “investment property” in official disclosures for years. Her lawyers and those representing Mr. Comey have used similar tactics to fight their prosecutions. Both are challenging Ms. Halligan’s legitimacy as U.S. attorney, given the unusual circumstances of her appointment, and both are seeking to convince their judges that the cases against them are vindictive and selective prosecutions. Motions seeking to dismiss cases as vindictive or selective are rarely successful, partly because prosecutors are granted broad discretion to pursue cases of their choosing. Motions for vindictive prosecution must show that prosecutors would not have brought cases but for animus, while selective prosecution claims require defendants to prove that prosecutors have effectively discriminated against them by failing to bring charges against similarly situated individuals. But the circumstances of Ms. James’s indictment, as well as district judges’ growing distrust of the Justice Department, could ease her lawyers’ burden. Ms. James’s lawyers wrote that the “spree of venomous statements and actions” against her by Mr. Trump and his deputies showed that her prosecution was motivated by “the exact type of retaliation against protected activities that the vindictive prosecution doctrine seeks to protect against.” Much of their motion is a retelling of the administration’s pressure campaign against Ms. James, which has included a “weaponization working group” formed to scrutinize her investigation and others into Mr. Trump and an unusual civil rights investigation into her office by the Northern District of New York. The motion also notes how Mr. Trump’s subordinates have adopted his campaign against Ms. James. Asked about Ms. James’s investigation into Mr. Trump on Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi responded that “they thought they got away with it.” “Everything is on the table, we are investigating all the weaponization, all the wrongdoing that has happened,” Ms. Bondi said. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Bosse also took aim at Ed Martin, a former right-wing activist who is working inside the Justice Department as a “special attorney for mortgage fraud” and who has pushed the case against Ms. James. They noted that Mr. Martin had sent a letter to Ms. James’s lawyer calling on her to resign and that he even visited a home she owns in Brooklyn, posing for pictures outside. Mr. Trump has railed against Ms. James since 2019, when she opened an investigation into his business practices. Three years later, she sued him, accusing him of exaggerating his net worth by billions of dollars to receive favorable loans from banks and insurers. She prevailed over him at a civil fraud trial that ended in early 2024, but an appeals court recently threw out a nearly half-billion dollar penalty that was assessed by the trial judge. The case is now being scrutinized by New York’s highest court.
