Letitia James’ lawyer blasted the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” efforts to bring a baseless case against her after a grand jury refused to indict the New York attorney general for mortgage fraud.
After a judge threw out the Justice Department’s cases last month against James and another one of President Donald Trump’s foes, former FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s DOJ rushed to secure a new indictment and presented it to a grand jury just 10 days later, CNN reported.
The move backfired, though, and the grand jury on Thursday took the unusual step of failing to return an indictment, James’ attorney Abbe Lowell told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on The Source.
“I’ve practiced law for a long time, and in my experience as both a prosecutor, when I was that in the Justice Department, and as a defense attorney, I can’t tell you a time… where a federal prosecutor thought a case was strong enough to bring to a grand jury, and the grand jury has said no,” she said.
Lowell has represented numerous high-profile clients—including Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump—and is also defending another Trump target, Fed Governor Lisa Cook, against the president’s attempts to fire her.
During a federal grand jury hearing, which is conducted in secret, the prosecutor presents evidence to the jury to show probable cause—or reasonable grounds to believe—that a crime was committed.
Given that the prosecutor only has to present favorable evidence and there’s no defense to make a counter-argument, the popular saying goes that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Lowell said it was already “unprecedented” for the government to bring a case “with no basis,” but that she’d heard the government might try bringing the case before a new grand jury in a different city in Virginia.
“If they do that, people need to pay attention,” she said. “It’s not like this is normal, but what it does do is show how far they’ll go to break the rule of law, to do a revenge tour that President Trump has ordered.”
The White House and the DOJ both declined to comment.
In September, the president inadvertently published a private Truth Social message intended only for Bondi calling for the prosecutions of Comey, James, and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.
Trump had long called for them to be prosecuted after James led a civil fraud case against Trump in New York and Comey oversaw a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Schiff, who served 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before running for Senate, led the House’s 2020 impeachment of Trump.
Around the same time that Trump accidentally published his message to Bondi, acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, veteran prosecutor Erik Siebert, refused to charge James with mortgage fraud, citing a lack of evidence in the case.
Trump replaced him with his personal attorney Lindsey Halligan, a former beauty pageant contestant and insurance lawyer with no prior prosecutorial experience.
A judge ruled on Nov. 24 that Halligan’s appointment was invalid, so the DOJ brought in a new prosecutor from Missouri to try Thursday to secure an indictment, Lowell said.
The latest failure was a “pretty big embarrassment” for both Trump and the DOJ, the CNN host noted, given how rare it is for a grand jury to refuse to indict.
Asked if there was any indication why the grand jury refused to indict, Lowell said more information about the secret proceedings might come out over the next few days.
“We filed a motion that probably had seven single-spaced pages of statements President Trump has made to go after [James],” she said. “If they re-indict or if they try to up it again and they keep trying, and again, all they’re doing is making our motion stronger and stronger.”
James said in a statement Thursday, “As I have said from the start, the charges against me are baseless. It is time for this unchecked weaponization of our justice system to stop.”
“I am grateful to the members of the grand jury and humbled by the support I have received from across the country,” she added. “Now, I will continue to do my job standing up for the rule of law and the people of New York.”
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