The Justice Department’s indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is merely one part of a multipronged campaign that is helping define retribution in President Trump’s second term.
Over the summer, Ms. James’s office received a criminal subpoena demanding information about her yearslong civil investigation into the president. This month, a Virginia grand jury handed up charges accusing her of bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions stemming from her mortgage paperwork.
And in recent days, Trump-aligned media outlets have run scathing headlines about her relatives’ criminal records, amplifying the specter of wrongdoing created by the Justice Department. On Friday, Ms. James, who has said the charges have no merit, will appear in a Virginia court at the defendant’s table, formally facing allegations instead of pursuing them.
Mr. Trump’s crusade against those he believes wronged him may once have been interpreted as a tit-for-tat effort to go after his enemies. But it is becoming clear that creating the trappings of criminality — the headlines, the scrutiny, the reputational damage — is as much a part of the formula as any realistic chance of conviction.
The escalating campaign against Ms. James shows the power and utility of a Justice Department in the grip of a vengeful president: It can embarrass, distract and weaken political rivals and do favors for Mr. Trump, who is still seething over the many investigations that targeted him — and at times his family — both in and out of office.
The disruption and expense of a legal defense could constrain one of Mr. Trump’s most potent adversaries. Ms. James is one of the leaders of a coalition of Democratic attorneys general that has sued him 40 times to protect the interests of their constituents against the administration’s policies.
The criminal investigation into her office, meanwhile, could undermine the remaining consequences of the civil fraud lawsuit she brought against him. Though a roughly half-billion-dollar penalty assessed by a New York judge last year was recently thrown out by an appeals court, other punishments — including an independent monitor overseeing the Trump Organization’s business operations — are still in place.
Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former U.S. attorney during the Obama administration, said that prosecutors have traditionally been trained to treat the subjects of investigations and defendants with respect, to protect the bedrock American principle that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.
“When you have a president saying they’re guilty as hell before they are charged, it seems like the process is working in reverse,” she said. “It seems that humiliation is the goal instead of humiliation being a collateral consequence of a conviction. It’s the tail wagging the dog.”
A White House spokeswoman referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
The Trump administration has accused several of the president’s enemies of mortgage fraud, but the case against Ms. James is the first of those allegations to result in an indictment. And cases involving home mortgages, by their very nature, drag defendants’ private lives into the public eye for months, long before a jury can evaluate whether a crime was committed.
Such charges could be a potent weapon against almost anyone the administration sees fit to target.
Criminal allegations, inevitably, set off intrigue and public scrutiny of defendants. In the past, federal prosecutors have generally sought to avoid stoking those fires.
The Trump administration has been different. After the previous top prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia told officials that he did not believe Ms. James’s conduct merited charges, he was pushed out and replaced with a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, Lindsey Halligan. Ms. Halligan then took the case before a grand jury, overruling career prosecutors who had expressed skepticism.
Ed Martin, a Justice Department official who has pushed for Ms. James’s prosecution, posted on social media the morning of her indictment to hint that the charges were imminent. After the indictment was announced, he returned to his earlier post to add a thumbs-up.
The president has told people that Mr. Martin is one of his favorites at the Justice Department, and Mr. Martin has been explicit about the role that the department can play in embarrassing enemies of the administration. In the spring, he said that regardless of whether charges could be brought, “bad actors” would be exposed. “We will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed,” he said.
As the prosecution of Ms. James has made clear, the potential for embarrassment extends far beyond the person under indictment. So far it has landed chiefly on her great-niece, Nakia Thompson, who lives in the Norfolk, Va., house in question and has a criminal record in both Virginia and North Carolina. Other relatives have also come under scrutiny.
In North Carolina, Ms. Thompson is listed as an absconder for having failed to serve out her sentence of probation supervision after being convicted of misdemeanor trespass and assault in 2011. The local district attorney determined that Ms. Thompson’s crimes were too low-level for the state to expend the effort to extradite her, but her past has been the subject of aggressive coverage in the right-wing media.
Ms. Thompson’s residency in the house is one of several factors that call the Justice Department’s accusations against Ms. James into question. Though the government has accused Ms. James of improperly using the house as a “rental investment property,” Ms. Thompson testified before a grand jury that she has not paid rent, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
And Ms. James has reported only $1,350 in rental income — all dating from 2020, the year she purchased the house, according to three people with knowledge of her filings. A document amending Ms. James’s mortgage agreement allowed for short-term rentals.
Elliott Jacobson, a former federal prosecutor who spent years trying cases in Manhattan, including bank fraud prosecutions, said that any case relying on that amending document — which is cited prominently in the indictment — was “doomed.”
He added that Ms. James’s lawyers might be able to file a motion under a rule of federal criminal procedure arguing that the “evidence is insufficient to sustain a conviction.”
But the prosecution has yet to present its evidence, making it difficult to fully assess the strength of its case.
Legalities aside, the personal aspects of Ms. James’s prosecution lend themselves to the type of political mud fight at which Mr. Trump and his allies have excelled since they dominated headlines in the tabloid golden era of the 1980s. The contemporary media environment, in which it can be difficult for the public to tell the difference between sober legal analysis and partisan commentary, is also an asset for the administration.
Dredging up past accusations against Ms. James’s niece, though irrelevant to the attorney general’s purported crime, could engender further skepticism of Ms. James, especially among the broad sections of the public who are unlikely to dive into the details of a $19,000 bank fraud case, and whose views may be colored by partisanship.
Ms. James is a useful first target for Mr. Trump’s transformative use of prosecutorial power. She is a longstanding villain in the eyes of the MAGA movement and an official whose apparent eagerness to use law enforcement power against Mr. Trump raised eyebrows in even liberal legal circles in New York.
In 2018, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Ms. James campaigned for attorney general on a pledge to investigate him and his company. After she was elected, she made good on that promise. In 2022, she filed a lawsuit against him, accusing him of exaggerating his net worth by billions of dollars.
Given his long history of interactions with the justice system, Mr. Trump has a unique understanding of how the shadow of criminality can be used for political purposes.
When Mr. Trump came under investigation by his own Justice Department during his first term, he repeatedly complained to aides and senior department officials about why the agency was investigating him and not his enemies. And as those investigations accelerated, he became increasingly fixated on using the department to prosecute his adversaries.
While Mr. Trump demanded that his rivals be investigated during his first term — and many ultimately did come under scrutiny — none were successfully prosecuted.
While out of office, Mr. Trump was indicted four times and convicted once, and was the defendant in three civil trials, including one that stemmed from Ms. James’s lawsuit.
Mr. Trump has dwelt on the way that the investigations affected his family. As recently as last week, in the midst of an Oval Office news conference, Mr. Trump reflected on that impact, mentioning his wife, Melania, and three sons, Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron Trump.
“He got more subpoenas than anybody in the history of our country,” the president said of Eric, who along with Donald Jr. was also found liable in the fraud case. “He’s an innocent, good boy. He’s a good kid, he’s always been a good kid. All of my children are good — they went through hell.”
As Mr. Trump’s aides prepared for a second term, they determined that he should not be held back. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump pledged that if he returned to power he would exact revenge.
Within weeks of his return to the White House, the Justice Department set up a “Weaponization Working Group,” responsible, in part, for scrutinizing Ms. James and her office.
In April, Mr. Trump called for Ms. James’s resignation in a Truth Social post, calling her “totally corrupt” and a “wacky crook.” The next day, an administration official sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department, prompting the investigation that resulted in Ms. James’s indictment.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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.
Michael S. Schmidt is an investigative reporter for The Times covering Washington. His work focuses on tracking and explaining high-profile federal investigations.
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