Attorney General Letitia James of New York is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.
According to a person with knowledge of the case, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia issued subpoenas in connection with claims that James had falsely claimed a Virginia single-family house as her primary residence in order to secure better loan conditions.
The federal investigation comes after William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency under the Trump administration, referred James for criminal investigation.
Pulte asked the DOJ to look into that case and another instance in which James allegedly lied about the number of livable units in a multifamily Brooklyn home in order to get better loan terms.
“These baseless and long-discredited allegations, put to rest by my April 24 letter to the Department of Justice, are suddenly back in the news just days after President Trump publicly attacked Attorney General James,” James’ attorney, Abbe Lowell, stated Thursday.
“This appears to be the political retribution President Trump threatened to exact that AG Bondi assured the Senate would not occur on her watch. If prosecutors are genuinely interested in the truth, we are prepared to meet false claims with facts.”
Lowell wrote a follow-up letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department after Pulte’s criminal referral was forwarded to them, accusing the president of pursuing “political retribution.”
During Trump’s first few months in office, James has joined a group of Democratic attorneys general who have filed lawsuits to block many of his policies.
James also served as the primary prosecutor in a case she filed against Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging that the president had fabricated company records to secure better loan conditions during his campaign. A judge finally ordered him to pay hundreds of millions, but he is still contesting the decision.
“The stunning hypocrisy of President Trump’s complaint that the Justice Department had been ‘politicized’ and ‘weaponized’ against him is laid bare as he and others in his administration are now asking you to undertake the very same practice,” Lowell stated to Bondi.
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In his correspondence, Lowell cited incidents in which Trump had personally assaulted James and demanded retribution.
Lowell also addressed the accusations, addressing the allegation that while working as a state official in New York, James identified a house in Virginia as her principal residence. Lowell claims that James made a mistake by indicating in a power-of-attorney letter that she had no intention of utilizing the home as a primary residence. Lowell noted that James had told her lender in other documents that the house in Virginia would not be her primary residence.
In order to obtain higher credit rates, James is also charged with fraud for allegedly misrepresenting the number of habitable units in a multifamily Brooklyn property.
Lowell claims that Pulte pointed to a 2001 certificate of occupancy while ignoring current records that identified the house as a four-unit multifamily property.
