Letitia James is New York’s chief legal officer, leading an office of 1,700 people, including 800 lawyers. And now she’s a criminal defendant.
After Ms. James, who has been New York’s attorney general since 2018, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of bank fraud and false statements, she vowed to keep doing her job leading one of the country’s largest prosecutor’s offices.
The indictment in the Eastern District of Virginia, she said in a statement, is “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system.” She called the charges “baseless.”
The case’s impact on her job will be “zero,” said James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who teaches about the position at Harvard Law School. It is not the first time that an attorney general has been indicted and continued to lead, Mr. Tierney said.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, was elected to the office in 2014 and indicted the following year on charges of felony security fraud. In 2024, he reached a deal with prosecutors to avoid a trial.
Professional life will go on in Albany and New York City as it did in Austin, he said.
“There are 800 professional lawyers in that office, and they will all be at their desk working tomorrow doing what they were doing today,” Mr. Tierney said. “It’s just as simple as that.”
The attorney general’s office in New York operates independently of the governor, and undertakes statewide civil and criminal investigations. The office investigates a range of crimes, including financial wrongdoing, Medicaid fraud and deaths caused by police officers.
In addition, there are the dozens of lawsuits that Ms. James and other state attorneys general have filed against the Trump administration. Ms. James has also been part of almost 40 lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s sweeping and fast-moving agenda in his second term, leading or helping to lead 17 of those suits.
Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University’s School of Law, said that ethical guidelines would not require Ms. James to recuse herself from those cases.
Ms. James, a Democrat who campaigned in 2018 on a promise to hold Donald Trump accountable, has remained in the president’s cross hairs ever since. After investigating Mr. Trump for several years, she brought a lawsuit against him in 2022 that accused him of overvaluing his worth. As Mr. Trump arrived to court for the first day of the civil trial in 2023, he lobbed attacks against Ms. James and the judge overseeing the case.
“You ought to go after this attorney general,” he said outside the courthouse.
She won the suit, though a $500 million judgment against Mr. Trump was thrown out this year as excessive.
In a video statement following her indictment on Thursday, Ms. James said, “We will fight these baseless charges aggressively, and my office will continue to fiercely protect New Yorkers and their rights. And I will continue to do my job.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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