Letitia James built her career promising to get Donald Trump, and now the machinery she built to do it is coming apart from the inside. A New York prosecutor says the state attorney general’s office told employees to “find and pursue crimes” involving President Trump and businesses connected to him — and the email laying it all out was later scrubbed from the office’s servers, Fox News reports, citing the Times Union.
The prosecutor is Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, who works in the office’s Investor Protection Bureau under bureau chief Shamiso Maswoswe. On Friday he sent an agency-wide email to his colleagues describing instructions “to find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump,” according to the Times Union. Read that backwards. Prosecutors are supposed to start with a crime and look for a suspect — Wiesenfeld says his bosses started with a suspect and sent him looking for a crime.
He got specific about who was on the list. Wiesenfeld alleged Maswoswe directed him to go after “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger)… without having a credible reason for targeting [these] organizations and individuals.” Just a list of names, one of them the sitting president, and an order to find something.
Then the email was allegedly wiped from the office’s servers, and a follow-up note from James’ general counsel, Kumiki Gibson, told staff the matter was “internal” and that no employees were “in danger,” the Times Union reported. The New York Post reported that Wiesenfeld was placed on paid administrative leave. The man who raised the alarm is out of the building, and the alarm itself is gone.
James’ office is treating a hunting license aimed at the president as a human-resources footnote. A spokesperson for the Office of the New York Attorney General told Fox News Digital: “This is a personnel matter. The Office of the Attorney General is committed to upholding New York’s laws and protecting the rights and freedoms of all New Yorkers, regardless of political beliefs. We strongly reject any assertion to the contrary.” The White House was not buying it. Spokesperson Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital: “This is more proof of the weaponization of the justice system by Letitia James to target President Trump and her political opponents. The far-left Democrats lawfare against President Trump, his family, and allies must stop.”
The bureau chief at the center of this has her own history with the Trump name. Maswoswe was a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section from January 2016 until she was fired in December 2017, during Trump’s first term. She sued the DOJ in 2021 claiming race and pregnancy discrimination, joined James’ office in February 2022, and collected a $795,000 settlement in 2023 — money the department called a compromise of disputed claims, not an admission. None of this is new. James campaigned on investigating Trump’s business dealings, sued him and the Trump Organization in 2022, and won a judgment of more than $450 million in penalties before an appeals court upheld the liability finding but threw out the financial penalty entirely.
This is a window into what happens when a prosecutor’s office stops asking which law was broken and starts asking who we want to break it. The targets were chosen first and the crimes were supposed to come later, and when one of James’ own lawyers said so in writing, the office’s answer was to delete the email and put him on leave. Americans deserve an attorney general who enforces the law, not one who treats it as a search warrant for her political enemies.
Source: foxnews.com