https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-edit-james-duty-20190104-story.html
The state’s new top legal officer, Attorney General Tish James, is well equipped for the job in many ways. She will protect consumers from getting scammed and workers from being cheated out of pay. She will defend New York’s interests when they collide with Washington’s on the environment, immigration and more.
The Empire State also happens to be home to President Trump’s family business and (dissolving) foundation, making it fertile terrain for civil and criminal investigations. Here, James may have made her own job harder.
Prosecutors are often also politicians, but they owe it to their potential targets, and to the public’s trust in justice, not to let their leanings cloud or seem to cloud their judgment as they flex the long arm of the law.
As a candidate, James called Trump an “illegitimate President.” She characterized foreign governments’ payments to Trump family holdings as constituting a “pattern and practice of money laundering.”
After winning election, she said “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.”
Of Robert Mueller, she said, “I think he’s closing in on this President, and his days are going to be coming to an end shortly.”
In a 2013 ruling, New York’s highest court wrote that in rare situations, “the appearance of impropriety itself is a ground for disqualification” of a prosecutor from a case, “when the appearance is such as to ‘discourage public confidence in our government and the system of law to which it is dedicated.’ ”
Unable to read tea leaves, we do not know whether courts would consider James’ statements as candidate or as AG-elect sufficient to force her recusal. (There’s no risk a case would be dismissed solely on such grounds.)
Going forward, however, she must demonstrate that rhetorical discretion is the better part of effective law enforcement.
