Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who successfully prosecuted President Donald Trump, was charged Wednesday.
A federal grand jury in Virginia issued the indictment. This is also where charges were recently brought against another Trump opponent, former FBI director James Comey.
CNN and other US news agencies say that the 66-year-old James, a Democrat, is being charged with mortgage fraud. The charges are related to a property she helped her niece buy in Virginia in 2023.
After the former prosecutor quit, stating there wasn’t enough evidence to charge James and Comey, the Republican president chose Lindsey Halligan to be the new US attorney and launch the cases against them.
Halligan personally presented the case to the grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, according to The Washington Post.
Trump has openly told Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after James, Comey, and other people he perceives as adversaries. This is part of his ongoing pursuit of revenge against political opponents.
James filed a big civil fraud case against Trump after he left the White House in 2021. He said that Trump and his real estate company had illegally overstated his wealth and changed the worth of buildings to get better bank loans or insurance terms.
A judge in New York ordered Trump to pay $464 million, but a higher court eventually threw down the fine while keeping the original decision.
Trump has also publicly called for the prosecution of Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and his own former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, in addition to James and Comey.
After Erik Siebert, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned down, it was alleged that he told Justice Department authorities that wasn’t enough evidence to charge James and Comey.
Prosecution out of spite
On Wednesday, Comey, 64, the former head of the FBI, pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to Congress and getting in the way of a congressional procedure.
The judge set the trial date for January 5. If found guilty, Comey could spend up to five years in prison.
Patrick Fitzgerald, Comey’s lawyer, said he plans to file a move to have the case thrown out because it is a selective and vindictive prosecution.
Comey’s indictment comes from sworn testimony he made to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020 about the investigation he headed into whether Russia had an effect on the 2016 US presidential election.
He is accused of lying when he said he hadn’t given permission for another FBI employee to be an anonymous source in press stories.
In 2013, President Barack Obama chose Comey to lead the FBI. In 2017, Trump fired him when the FBI was looking into whether any members of the Trump presidential campaign had worked with Moscow to change the 2016 election.
Since he took office in January, Trump has punished people he thought were adversaries by firing government workers he thought were disloyal, going after legal firms that had worked on cases against him in the past, and cutting off federal money to colleges and universities.
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