New York Attorney General Letitia James
By Dan Murphy
Something strange has happened to the Attorney General of New York. She has started denying her own biography.
Sitting with the New York Editorial Board last week, a collection of leading New York City journalists, Letitia James was asked by former NY1 Noticia anchor Juan Manuel Benítez about the issue that made her a household name. She interrupted him. “No, no, no, no. I’m not fighting Donald Trump.” A beat later: “I have no animus against Donald Trump.” When Benítez pointed out that she had run for the office promising exactly that fight, she explained that “what you heard was politics, and politics stops at the door of the Office of the Attorney General.”
It’s a preposterous thing for James to say – a shameless thing to say two weeks before an election, and only after hearing the footsteps of dynamo challenger Saritha Komatireddy.
James came into office in 2019 having told anyone with a microphone that she was targeting a single person for prosecution, and she did it, for years, with the full weight of an office that is supposed to protect 20 million people from crime and fraud here in New York. She got the cameras and national profile, but her case collapsed in the end. New York taxpayers were on the hook for millions and got nothing out of it. The point isn’t Trump. It’s that an attorney general used the job as a platform, and ran it accordingly.
Look at what the office did when it wasn’t chasing headlines. In 2020 James issued a report attacking the NYPD and opened an investigation into police subway fare enforcement, at the exact moment the city was beginning to lose control of its transit system. Her office has directed settlement money to groups that organize against the police. Officers noticed. The Buffalo and Syracuse PBAs and the Rochester Police Locust Club endorsed her opponent, as did State Troopers and 41 county sheriffs across the state. That doesn’t happen to an attorney general who is doing the job.
The results are a matter of record. The Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which prosecuted nearly a hundred cases the year before she arrived, convicted 19 people in 2024, inside a $126 billion program that federal inspectors say shifted from criminal to civil enforcement as a “deliberate leadership choice.” Homeless, mentally ill New Yorkers froze to death on city streets last winter while the office that oversees charities went years without seriously examining the nonprofits paid to shelter them. Antisemitic violence rose to levels the city had not seen in a generation, and the attorney general’s special hate-crime authority sat largely unused. When the office needed actual investigative muscle, it hired outside firms, one of which Harvey Weinstein had used before her.
Then came Cornell. Governor Hochul handed James the investigation of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity house, a case that demands discipline above everything. James promptly posted on social media that the young woman’s ordeal was “horrific and unacceptable,” which is a fine sentiment for a columnist and a disqualifying one for the person charged with establishing what happened. Any competent defense lawyer now has a social media post from the investigator declaring the outcome in advance. Asked about it at the debate, James said she would not comment on a Facebook post, when it was her own post. She had already commented. That was the problem. Unprofessional is the kind word.
The debate itself is where the panic became visible. By the Wall Street Journal’s count she invoked the president roughly eighteen times in an hour, against an opponent who kept talking about crime, fraud and the mentally ill. Asked to name a former New York attorney general she admired, she went silent for about ten seconds. Komatireddy filled the pause: “She only admires herself.” A Republican poll taken afterward found voters who watched the debate broke 81 to 19 for the challenger. A public Siena survey the month before had James ahead by thirteen. It’s now at six-points according to another. Independents have moved to Komatireddy.
So now the attorney general would like a do-over on the last eight years. Sorry, things don’t work that way.
When Benitez asked James “You ran on fighting and prosecuting President Donald Trump, Trump Organization, and you singled him out. Are you running on the same premise? And do you have any regrets?” James responded, “Each and every case that I engage in is based on facts and based on the law. Period, end of discussion.”
End of discussion is what people say when the discussion has started going badly. For eight years Letitia James told New Yorkers exactly who she was. The unsettling part is not that she is now pretending otherwise. It’s that she thinks we’re dumb.