Donald Trump Is Zeroing In on His Tish James Revenge Plans

The only surprise is that it has taken this long for Donald Trump to seek revenge against Letitia James. The president has been mad at New York State’s attorney general since at least 2019, when Trump accused her of “harassing all of my New York businesses.” Since then, he has blasted James as “racist,” “incompetent,” and “evil,” among many other things. Yet it wasn’t until last week that Trump moved to try to actually damage James, cheering on a possible investigation by his Department of Justice into her real estate transactions.

Trump’s camp, including the notorious political trickster Roger Stone, has been promoting allegations that James lied on mortgage documents to receive better loan terms on properties she purchased in Virginia and Brooklyn. The Trump-appointed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a criminal referral letter to the DOJ last week, saying James “appeared to have falsified records.” James, in an interview with NY1, dismissed the accusations as “baseless.” Yet in recent days, she fortified her defenses considerably by hiring high-powered lawyer Abbe Lowell, who on Thursday sent US attorney general Pam Bondi a blistering six-page letter, with 20-plus pages of attachments, assailing the “stunning hypocrisy” of Trump’s “latest act of improper political retribution.”

Exactly how much legal vulnerability James could face is hard to assess. Lawyers—leery of getting between a vindictive president and New York’s highest-ranking prosecutor—are reluctant to offer opinions. And the publicly known facts are murky and incomplete. The oddest and potentially most problematic item is a 2023 notarized power of attorney form, signed by James, on which she attested that Virginia would be her primary residence—even as she held office in New York.

Still, the ominous-sounding term criminal referral carries little practical weight: Bondi has no obligation to launch an investigation. She has even less incentive to clear James’s name. “I think they are going to try to string along the illusion of something real for as long as possible. There will be no exoneration,” a James insider says. “They will drag this out as long as they can, and it will make good fodder for Roger Stone.”

Indeed, Trump has probably only started finding ways to try to torment James, who bashed him as an “illegitimate president” when she was running for AG and who last year won a more than $450 million civil judgment against Trump after arguing that he had conspired to misrepresent his net worth. (Trump is appealing that ruling.) “If I was Tish James, I would be quite concerned,” a prominent New York Democratic strategist says. “Because whether or not this mortgage thing is real, what it indicates is an unequivocal commitment to making her life miserable. The goal seems to be to make it painful for her so [that] when she’s up for reelection in 2026, she decides, I’m not going to run again. Anybody targeted by this president or by this Department of Justice, it’s a dangerous thing right now.”

Luis Miranda Jr., a longtime political adviser to James, scoffs at the idea that she would be cowed by Trump: “At the end of the day, she will be reelected because most people can separate the truth from fake news.” But Miranda sees the real estate fraud allegations and the headlines they have generated—particularly in the relentless New York Post—as an invitation for Republican candidates to take on James with the support of Trump’s allies. “What this does is to create a narrative that whoever runs against her can pick and choose from the many outlets who exist exclusively to feed us fake news,” Miranda says. “I have no doubt that Trump’s people will find someone to run against Tish. And I have no doubt that people like Elon Musk will help finance that campaign. This is the red meat that they live for.”

Trump, if he is interested, could have a wider impact on New York’s politics, and soon. In February, Trump’s DOJ went to great lengths to bail New York City mayor Eric Adams out of legal trouble, presumably so that Adams would be helpful to Trump on deportation policy. Now Kentucky Republican congressman James Comer has asked the DOJ to charge Andrew Cuomo over past testimony regarding pandemic nursing home policy. Might Trump be tempted to mess with Cuomo, who is the front-runner to replace Adams in City Hall?

An even cleaner play has presented itself in New York’s gubernatorial race. Trump had nominated Elise Stefanik, an upstate Republican congresswoman, to be his US ambassador to the United Nations, before suddenly getting nervous about the narrow GOP House majority and asking her to remain on Capitol Hill. Now Stefanik, a staunch Trump acolyte, is flirting with a run for governor of New York next year, a campaign she is unlikely to undertake without the president’s blessing. Stefanik would challenge incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul, who has angered Trump over congestion pricing and other issues. Hochul won a scarily tight race in 2022, and Stefanik, with Trump’s financial and rhetorical backing, could be a formidable opponent. “Trump is not the kryptonite that the left wants him to be in New York,” says Joe Borelli, a Republican former New York City councilman turned political consultant. “And I think it opens the door to a lot of money coming into races on our side.”

Trump officially changed his main residence to Florida in 2019. But he obviously retains a deep attachment to New York: He has even weighed in on a controversy involving the name and image of a Long Island high school’s mascot. New York remains a mostly blue state, though Trump made surprising gains with city voters last November. Combine his elation over those results with his animus toward New York’s Democrats, and Trump has plenty of fuel for making mischief all across the state’s political landscape.