New York Attorney General Letitia James pleaded not guilty Friday to a mortgage fraud indictment secured by a Donald Trump loyalist after the president demanded James and other political opponents be charged.
The administration installed Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump personal lawyer with no prior prosecutorial experience, to lead the Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney’s Office. She brought the case after career prosecutors objected to charging James and former FBI Director James Comey, who likewise pleaded not guilty earlier to the indictment pending against him in the same Virginia district.
Comey already lodged a challenge to the legality of Halligan’s interim appointment, and James has signaled she will do the same. That’s just one of the issues these prosecutions face, another being the looming legal question in several cases brought by the Trump Justice Department of whether they are unconstitutionally vindictive or selective.
The indictment against James, who previously brought the New York state civil fraud case against Trump, alleges that she committed bank fraud and made false statements to a financial institution in connection with a mortgage she got on a Virginia home. The indictment alleges that she obtained “total ill-gotten gains of approximately $18,933 over the life of the loan.”
When the indictment came out earlier this month, James called the charges “baseless” and said Trump’s “own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”
In addition to signaling ahead of the arraignment that she’ll challenge the legality of Halligan’s interim appointment, James also filed a motion to enforce rules against the government’s extrajudicial disclosures and statements. Among other things, the motion highlighted what it called “a stunning disclosure of internal government information,” citing a report by Lawfare’s Anna Bower that detailed a digital messaging exchange she had with Halligan after the prosecutor reached out to her. “In initiating this contact, Ms. Halligan — the lead prosecutor on this case as of the date of this filing — commented on the credibility and general strength of the evidence presented to the grand jury,” James’ lawyers wrote, adding that such statements “by any prosecutor, let alone one purporting to be the U.S. Attorney, run afoul of and violate the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Code of Federal Regulations, this Court’s Local Rules, various rules of ethical and professional responsibility, and DOJ’s Justice Manual.” In the civil fraud case that apparently prompted Trump’s desire for revenge against James, she secured a massive financial penalty last year that an intermediate state appellate panel upended this summer, in a mixed ruling that both sides said they will appeal to the state’s top court. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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