New York Attorney General Letitia James is not backing down.
Her sprawling business fraud case against President Trump took a meteoric hit when a divided appeals court Thursday threw out the roughly $500 million civil fraud penalty against him and his company despite keeping the case intact.
However, she vowed to appeal to the state’s highest court, even as the Justice Department has turned up the heat on her, pursuing probes scrutinizing her office and personal real estate in an escalation of Trump’s vows for retribution against his foes.
James is among Trump’s most prominent adversaries after winning the civil fraud case against him and his business, resulting in a finding that he altered his net worth for tax and insurance benefits — a blow to his real estate mogul image.
It puts New York’s top prosecutor back on a collision course with the president.
“I do think it’s clear that this is retribution,” said Catherine Christian, a veteran New York trial lawyer who has closely followed the case.
“This is like, ‘I’m paying you back for what you did to me,’” she said.
Before the decision came down, DOJ had already stepped up its pressure campaign.
Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of New York earlier this month issued two subpoenas seeking information tied to James’s cases against the president’s Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association (NRA).
In the fraud case, which James brought against Trump in 2022, a trial court judge found Trump, his two eldest sons and the company liable for fraud. He ordered them to pay $464 million, plus daily interest that had raised the total to more than $527 million by Thursday’s appeals court ruling.
The five-judge panel in New York’s mid-level Appellate Division agreed on little more than that the monetary penalty was unlawfully excessive. Despite none of the court’s three opinions garnering majority support, a consensus was reached to move the case forward to the Court of Appeals, New York’s top court.
“It almost looked to me like the Appellate Division was passing the buck to the Court of Appeals to make the final decision,” said Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University and former New York prosecutor.
James sued the NRA and its top leadership in 2020. A judge last year found NRA head Wayne LaPierre misspent millions of the organization’s dollars to fund a lavish lifestyle and ordered him to pay the NRA $4.35 million in damages. The group’s retired former finance chief, Wilson Phillips, was ordered to pay $2 million to the NRA, and the court later directed the organization to enact more than a dozen reforms to its governance to avoid future violations.
Both the business fraud and NRA suits prompted criticism from the political right that James, a Democrat, was using her office to go after conservative leaders and companies.
But the Trump administration’s focus on James now doesn’t stop at her work as New York’s attorney general.
The Justice Department is also probing a criminal referral made by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that alleges James claimed a Virginia home as her primary residence to secure advantageous loan terms. The agency suggested that James “falsified bank documents and property records” to acquire better terms.
Ed Martin, now Trump’s “weaponization czar,” among other titles, after failing to earn Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney for D.C., was tapped to lead the investigation.
He wrote in a letter last week to James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, that the New York attorney general would “best serve the good of the state and nation” by resigning from her post.
“I would take this as an act of good faith,” Martin wrote.
He later posed for a photo outside James’s Brooklyn home. The Hill reached out for comment.
Lowell wrote in a Monday letter back to Martin obtained by The Hill that the display amounted to a breach of professional conduct, suggesting the “truly bizarre, made-for-media stunt” falls “outside the bounds of DOJ and ethics rules.”
The lawyer also criticized Martin for seeming to seek “revenge” against James.
“All the above indicate to me that you are not conducting a serious investigation or review of ‘mortgage fraud,’ and that, despite the lack of evidence or law, you will take whatever actions you have been directed to take to make good on President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s calls for revenge for that reason alone,” Lowell wrote.
Christian, who once tried a case against James, said she doesn’t think the attorney general will be intimidated by the Justice Department’s efforts but called them “highly unprofessional and just inappropriate.”
“If it’s true that that’s the crime that they’re investigating, you can’t get more frivolous than that,” Christian said.
The Justice Department’s probes follow years of accusations from Trump that James has weaponized the courts for political gain. A spokesperson for the president’s legal team on Thursday called the civil fraud case a “political crusade” and “lawfare campaign” against the president.
One judge on the New York appeal court panel seemed to agree.
Judge David Friedman, who wrote one of the court’s three opinions, claimed the record made clear James sought to use the law and judicial system “for political ends,” pointing to the attorney general’s 2018 campaign vows to investigate Trump.
But Judges Peter Moulton and Dianne Renwick, who wrote the principal opinion, said “the antithesis is true.”
They argued that the “‘political’ choice” for James would have been to leave the case alone, avoiding a fight with a “powerful adversary.”
“Her allegations have been tested at every stage of this maximalist litigation and for the most part have been upheld,” they wrote. “We now have before us the evidence the Attorney General amassed and it demonstrates that defendants engaged in a decade-long pattern of financial fraud and illegality.”
James herself on Thursday doubled down, saying that it should “not be lost to history” that another court had found Trump violated the law and her case has merit.
Though Trump and the other defendants have not yet said whether they will also appeal, a high-stakes battle at New York’s highest court seems destined.
“Everybody knows that what they’re deciding is a case involving the fate of the president of the United States — his business, his reputation,” Gershman said.
“Is that going to be a significant factor? Who knows,” he added. “You can’t really do more than speculate.”
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