New York’s Trump Inquisition AG Letitia James better have good justification for her investigation.
One feature that distinguishes the U.S. legal system from, say, Russia’s, is that prosecutors are charged with pursuing justice—not politically disfavored individuals or families. New York Attorney General Letitia James’s legal pursuit of Donald Trump, his organization and his children, now entering its fourth calendar year, smacks of the latter. She’s now trying to compel testimony from two of the former President’s children, and there had better be rock-solid evidence of significant wrongdoing at the end of this road to justify the corrosive appearance of politicized justice.
Ms. James’s investigation, according to a 2020 court filing, focuses on whether Mr. Trump or others “improperly inflated the value of [his] assets on annual financial statements in order to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.”
The Attorney General’s recent subpoena of Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, which they are trying to quash, seeks information “in connection with an investigation into the valuation of properties owned or controlled by Donald J. Trump or the Trump Organization, or any matter which the Attorney General deems pertinent thereto.”
A federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump seeking to halt the investigation notes that his son Eric already was deposed by Ms. James’s office in 2020, and that the former President has “produced over 8 million pages of documents in response to [Ms. James’s] subpoenas” since 2019.
The lawsuit notes that Ms. James’s 2018 campaign to be New York’s top legal officer was dominated by political attacks on Mr. Trump. She said she’d investigate “anyone in [Trump’s] orbit,” and declared the President “illegitimate.” Even Daniel Goldman, a Democratic ex-prosecutor who would go on to serve on the House 2019 impeachment investigation targeting Mr. Trump, said Ms. James’s campaign could “give the appearance of an individualized political vendetta,” the lawsuit says.
In June the Manhattan District Attorney indicted the Trump Organization and its former chief financial officer for allegedly concealing executive compensation. They’ve pleaded not guilty, and the charges might have been handled by a fine if not for Mr. Trump’s low political standing in New York.
Ms. James’s parallel investigation has yet to produce civil fraud charges. Attorneys General of both parties are increasingly entangled in national partisan politics, but it would take significant findings of fraud by her office to justify the damage to the legal system inflicted by an apparently political probe against an opposition party leader. Unless Ms. James has the goods and can prove them unambiguously, her investigation looks like more evidence of the decline of America’s rule of law.
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