Donald Trump knows how to keep his word when he wants to. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised retribution and retaliation against his political opponents. He specifically called out New York Attorney General Letitia James, the trailblazing prosecutor who beat Trump and the Trump organization in court; a judge found that Trump and the organization improperly inflated assets in financial documents to get favorable loan terms. (Trump is appealing the civil penalty).
In November 2023, Trump made a post characterizing James’ prosecution against him as a “ridiculous Political Witch Hunt against me” and wrote, “She should be prosecuted!
In November 2023, as the trial was going on, Trump made a social media post characterizing James’ prosecution against him as a “ridiculous Political Witch Hunt against me” and wrote, “She should be prosecuted!” At a campaign rally in January 2024, he said the judge and James “should be arrested and punished accordingly.”
He appears to be actively making good on those vows to pay back the people he says wrong him even though the facts and evidence don’t appear to justify it.
NBC News reported Friday that Attorney General Pam Bondi has made MAGA activist Ed Martin a “special attorney” to probe mortgage fraud allegations against James made by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William J. Pulte, a Trump nominee who took office in March. At the same time, The New York Times reported Friday that the office of John Sarcone III, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, sent James’ office two subpoenas last week that seek to discover if she violated the rights of Trump and his businesses, as well as the rights of the National Rifle Association. James’ office successfully won a corruption case against the NRA the week after she won the fraud case against Trump and the Trump organization. Sarcone’s office didn’t respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
Martin and Sarcone are wholly unqualified for their roles. Before their interim appointments this year, neither had ever been a prosecutor. Sarcone, who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate, wrongly said a panel of federal judges had voted to extend his interim appointment as a U.S. attorney. In fact, that panel refused to extend his appointment, and the DOJ got around that rejection with a maneuver that appears to have never been used for the appointment of a U.S. attorney. According to a letter the Times obtained from the Justice Department’s human resources division, Sarcone has been named “special attorney to the attorney general” indefinitely and is, bizarrely, serving as the acting U.S. attorney and as the office’s first assistant.
MAGA activist and election denier Ed Martin is so radical he couldn’t secure enough Republican senators to support his nomination to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Not even Trump phoning holdout Republican senators could get Martin over the finish line. His consolation prize was being made DOJ’s pardon attorney and director of DOJ’s “weaponization” working group, which Bondi established with the apparent mission to investigate public officials who — following the facts, law and court rules — secured indictments against Trump. Martin previously represented some Jan. 6, pro-MAGA rioters.
Martin and Sarcone fit the new mold of Trump’s DOJ appointees. Unbridled loyalty and fealty to Trump is more important than qualifications. Of the two, Martin is the bigger threat to the rule of law — that is, treating like cases alike — and the bigger threat to the DOJ’s post-Watergate norm of keeping partisan politics out of DOJ decision making.
“There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them,” he told reporters this spring. He said that “in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
That appears to be what is happening in James’ case. They’ll charge her if they can and shame her if they can’t. Let’s be clear that charges do not appear to be justified.
They’ll charge her if they can and shame her if they can’t.
Regarding the mortgage fraud allegations, Trump administration officials say in notarized papers, James listed a Virginia home as her “principal residence” to get better loan terms. James’s lawyer told ABC News that the accusation was a “lie based on a purposeful misreading of documents in a lawful real estate transaction.”
In a letter to Bondi in April, that attorney, Abbe D. Lowell, wrote, “Director Pulte cherry-picked an August 17, 2023 power of attorney that mistakenly stated the property to be Ms. James’ principal residence and at the same time absolutely ignored her very clear and all caps statement two weeks earlier to the mortgage loan broker that “[t]his property WILL NOT be my primary residence.”
Lowell attached email messages that he said show that James was clear that the property would be her niece’s primary residence and that the “broker understood this” because he responded that James would be considered “a non-occupying co-borrower.”
Another allegation from Trump’s FHFA says James wrongly claimed that a five-unit dwelling she bought in Brooklyn in 2001 only had four units — as the Times explains “possibly in order to receive better interest rates.” But in the letter Lowell sent Bondi in April, the attorney writes, “The co-occupancy dwelling has four floors and, for as long as Ms. James has lived there, the property has always functioned as a four-person residence.” Lowell said that a 24-year-old certificate of occupancy mistakenly says it’s a 5-unit property, but he attached copies of multiple public documents that he say prove it’s a 4-unit property. Of course, if this were a legitimate investigation, the public would likely not even know about it. The DOJ manual prohibits disclosure of its ongoing investigations with exceptions only in limited circumstances. DOJ officials know this but don’t seem to care. News of a federal criminal referral first appeared in the conservative tabloid New York Post in April. That news dominated the conservative media ecosystem that weekend. Ditto this past weekend, when the appointments and grand jury probes became public. If this were a legitimate investigation, the public would likely not even know about it. What Trump’s DOJ is doing now appears to have been pulled from the same playbook his DOJ used against Democratic governors in New York and New Jersey during his first term. In December 2024, the DOJ’s inspector general found clear signs that politics drove the department’s investigation of pandemic-era nursing home deaths. According to that report, in 2020, most of the nursing homes with the lowest quality of care during the Covid pandemic were in the Republican-governed states of Texas and Indiana. None of the 30 worst-ranked facilities were in New York or New Jersey, states controlled by Democrats. However, the report mentions an alarming text message a senior official with the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs sent to at least one colleague Oct. 17, 2020, weeks before the presidential election. Using DOJ shorthand for the civil rights division and the civil division respectively the text, according to the IG report, said, “I’m trying to get [CRT] and CIV to do letters to [New York/New Jersey] respectively on nursing homes. Would like to package them together and let [the New York Post] break it. Will be our last play on them before election but it’s a big one.” “Our last play on them before the election.” Put plainly, DOJ officials were weaponizing the department’s vast powers to attack the president’s political opponents for partisan purposes. That’s exactly what Justice Department appointees appear to be doing now.
Anthony Coley
Anthony Coley is a legal analyst for NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. He was director of the Justice Department’s office of public affairs from February 2021 until January 2023. 
