The New York attorney general was an hour into a Westchester County town hall, expounding on her view of her mission during President Trump’s second term — on democracy and the need to defend it, on courage and the need to display it — when a middle-age man stood up and told her she was going to prison for mortgage fraud.
The attorney general, Letitia James, did not visibly react. As members of her staff escorted the man from the room, she thanked him with a small smile, said the allegations were baseless and turned her attention to a less fired-up attendee who was taking the microphone.
The episode in Westchester last month neatly encapsulated the role Ms. James has staked out in recent years as one of Mr. Trump’s chief antagonists, and the risks of having done so. The audience member was referring to allegations that have become the subject of a criminal investigation by Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, whose leaders have rewarded the president’s allies and targeted his foes.
Ms. James has been one of the president’s nemeses since she brought a fraud lawsuit against him three years ago, leading to a half-billion-dollar penalty that Mr. Trump has appealed. And unlike many of his enemies, she has not fallen silent during his second term.
Her office has filed 21 lawsuits against him, working with other Democratic attorneys general to take aim at everything from Elon Musk’s slashing approach to the federal government to the administration’s sudden freezing of federal funds for states.
Many of the suits have successfully barred the White House from achieving its goals, at least in the short term. In May, for instance, a judge blocked Mr. Trump from moving forward with mass layoffs that would have gutted the U.S. Department of Education.
Given Ms. James’s long-running investigation into his assets, Mr. Trump has been similarly fixated on her. He has attacked her on social media for years and in the last few months alone has called her “a totally corrupt politician” and a “wacky crook.”
Mr. Trump has also long pledged to get even with his enemies. Now, about six months into his second term, the role of the Justice Department in making good on those pledges has become increasingly clear.
The department has opened an investigation into the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral race, after demanding the dismissal of corruption charges against the man he is running to unseat. Mr. Trump has ordered the agency to scrutinize former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff. And the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, took the highly unusual step of publicly confirming, in an interview on Fox News, that his agency was conducting the criminal inquiry into Ms. James.
That investigation has focused at least in part on two properties, in Brooklyn and Virginia, and whether Ms. James manipulated records related to those properties to receive favorable loan terms.
The allegations — which Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, has said are stale, threadbare and long disproved — echo those that Ms. James pursued against Mr. Trump, with an important difference of scale. She argued that the president had garnered hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. The cumulative value of Ms. James’s properties is less than $2 million.
“This is just following the playbook of his retribution campaign,” Mr. Lowell said. “It takes nothing to ‘begin an investigation’ but that doesn’t mean there’s anything to investigate.”
Little has emerged to guide public understanding of the inquiry. Ms. James’s lawyers said they had seen few signs that the investigation was progressing, with little indication of subpoenas or witness interviews.
The lack of any updates after the very public pronouncement about the opening of the inquiry has left Ms. James in an unenviable position — one that Mr. Trump knows well. Being the target of an investigation can be a remarkable source of stress, and the blunt confirmation of an inquiry with no release of further details can serve as its own form of punishment.
A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment.
Ms. James has sought to project an air of untroubled focus on her job. In an interview with The New York Times before the investigation became public, she said, “We’re not concerned about any criminal indictment.”
Behind the scenes, though, she and her office have prepared for the worst. Along with the services of Mr. Lowell, a lawyer with vast experience representing public figures under duress, her office has retained Steven Banks, a recent departee from the firm Paul Weiss, to defend its staff members.
She has also hired several new employees with experience handling congressional inquiries. And she is benefiting from a $10 million appropriation in New York’s recently passed budget that provides money for private defense counsel for those targeted by the United States government.
Mutual Antagonism
When Ms. James first ran for New York attorney general in 2018, one of the primary planks of her campaign was her disdain for President Trump. She referred to him as illegitimate and to herself as a leader of the resistance — and pledged, if elected, to sue him.
She won and followed through, investigating Mr. Trump for years before bringing a lawsuit that accused him of overvaluing his riches, which she said allowed him to receive generous loan terms from banks and insurers.
His lawyers argued that Ms. James was politically biased, referring judges to her history of antagonistic comments. But multiple judges said those arguments were irrelevant, and allowed the lawsuit to continue, leading to a civil fraud trial that Mr. Trump lost. A New York State judge found him liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth and ordered him to pay a financial penalty that, with interest, exceeded $450 million.
Mr. Trump appealed the case, and some state appeals court judges appeared sympathetic to his lawyers’ arguments about the outsize power of the law under which Ms. James had brought her suit. The court has yet to issue a decision.
Asked about parallels between her inquiry into Mr. Trump, and the president’s apparent focus on her, Ms. James said that judges had recognized her inquiry to be substantive.
“The reality is that our case was based on a two-year investigation, and you cannot bring a case without facts and without evidence and without analysis of the law,” she said. “We did all of that.”
She has remained focused on Mr. Trump. On his second day back in office, she and a group of 21 other attorneys general challenged an executive order that refused to recognize all U.S.-born children as citizens.
Ms. James’s office has since led in nine of the 21 lawsuits the group has filed against the administration — to block Mr. Musk’s access to Treasury Department systems, to combat the gutting of the Education Department’s staff and to bar the Office of Management and Budget from enacting a sweeping freeze on federal funding to states.
Ms. James said that her intention was not to become the “face of the resistance” but rather to push back “against any attempt to expand the executive” and “any violation of the rule of law.”
Mr. Trump, in turn, has wasted no time in targeting Ms. James.
The Justice Department convened a working group to scrutinize her investigation into Mr. Trump, as well as other legal inquiries focusing on him. The president and his allies have said they would revoke any active security clearance Ms. James holds and curtail her access to federal buildings. (Ms. James said that she had been able to enter a federal courthouse after that particular threat was made. “I was even offered coffee,” she said.)
In March, allies of Mr. Trump began to circulate muckraking articles about the houses in Brooklyn and Virginia. Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, compiled those articles into a criminal referral that he sent to the Justice Department the following month.
While securing a loan for the Virginia house, Ms. James signed a form giving her niece power of attorney. On that form, she said that she would use the house as a principal residence, which she has not done, leading to the fraud allegations.
Mr. Lowell sent the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, documents showing that Ms. James had expressly told the mortgage broker that she would not use the property as a primary residence. The documents also showed that the broker had responded to acknowledge that Ms. James would not be living there.
Mr. Pulte and others have also accused Ms. James of misrepresenting the number of living units in the Brooklyn home, which they said could allow her to receive a loan that would not otherwise have been available to her. Although a January 2001 certificate of occupancy said that the house had five units, Ms. James has consistently said that it has four.
Mr. Lowell said that Ms. James has used the house as a four-person residence for as long as she has lived there. He accused Mr. Pulte of ignoring other official records that listed it as a four-unit property and attached those to his letter.
The Justice Department has not responded to — or engaged with — Mr. Lowell.
Hurubie Meko, Benjamin Oreskes and Anusha Bayya contributed reporting.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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