There is an old saw in the legal world. When a lawyer has the facts, he pounds the facts. When he has the law, he pounds the law. When he has neither the facts nor the law, he pounds the table.
Letitia James has been doing a lot of table-pounding lately. Her histrionics at a recent political rally for the Commie mayoral candidate in New York, Zohran Mamdani, were classic faux outrage and indignation by a defendant who knows the state has them dead to rights.
“We are witnessing the fraying of our democracy, the erosion of our system of government!” she shouted to the rapturous Commies in the crowd. “This, my friends, is a defining moment in our history!” Figuring the best defense is a good offense, and demonstrating poor grammar, James let loose with, “You come for me, you got to come through all of us! Every single one of us!” The audience cheered lustily for the alleged bank fraudster plumping for their messiah, Zohran, soon to take the Big Apple into the depths of socialist hell.
When one reads the facts unearthed and articulated so well by my indefatigable friend, Joel Gilbert, who has been doing yeoman’s journalistic work digging into Letitia James’s history, you come away in awe that Letitia James has gotten away with so much apparent fraud for so long.
Relying entirely on public record documents, Joel has laid out, since March of this year, in a series of articles for the Gateway Pundit, a remarkable pattern of apparent bank, mortgage, wire, tax and insurance fraud on the part of James. The pattern dates back to at least 1983, when a 23-year-old Letitia made her first audacious foray into real estate. James falsely claimed on mortgage documents for a home in New York that her father was her husband, which enabled her to secure a mortgage she would otherwise not qualify for.
That was the beginning of a lifetime of Letitia’s playing loosey-goosey with the truth to banks, mortgage companies, and government agencies. Next, she bought a five-unit apartment building in Brooklyn, but she falsely stated on mortgage documents that it was a four-unit building, crucially important because a building of four units or less allows one to get a residential mortgage at a much lower interest rate and much lower closing costs. Letitia continued to misrepresent the number of units in that building for the next 24 years, according to Gilbert.
But wait. There’s more! Letitia’s questionable real estate activities would go national when she went on to purchase three homes in Virginia, all with dubious claims appearing on documents associated with those purchases. She bought one home in foreclosure with her aunt, but Letitia’s own name doesn’t appear on the deed, which Gilbert says is illegal. In the case of another home James purchased in Norfolk, Virginia, James claimed that it was to be her “primary” residence. She did this despite being the New York State Attorney General, which requires primary residence to be in the state of New York, unsurprisingly.
Claiming the Norfolk home as her primary residence enabled James to secure a much better interest rate, as banks know that if you live in a home you own, you’re more likely to take better care of it. Stunningly, Gilbert says that the bank from which James sought the loan in that case rejected her loan application nine times! It was not until James indicated, falsely, on the loan application that it was to be her primary residence that they approved the loan. Only she didn’t live there. The house was occupied by one of her nieces, Nakia Thompson, who has a lengthy rap sheet and is currently considered an “absconder” in North Carolina, for having failed to complete probation in that state. So the Attorney General of New York is harboring a fugitive in one of her Virginia homes. Nice.
But it was false statements in the loan documentation for a third property in Virginia upon which the current federal indictment brought by US Attorney Lindsey Halligan against James rests. The terms of that loan stipulated that James was required to live in that home or use it as a second residence. She was not allowed to rent it out. But that’s precisely what she did.
Joel gave a superb 20-minute interview to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast, The War Room, which is an excellent precis of Letitia James’s (alleged) criminality. It provides everything you need to know about James’s multiple and brazen excursions into crime that would have long landed others in jail.
In his latest installment of the Letitia James crime saga at Gateway Pundit, Gilbert recalls how Letitia James railed against Donald Trump. She thundered that she had brought Donald Trump “to justice” for his alleged “bank fraud,” in which no one was actually defrauded, everyone made money, and the banks said they would happily do business with Trump again. Gilbert notes, “But today, now under indictment for mortgage fraud herself, that speech reads less like a moment of triumph and more like an act of projection.”
That’s exactly right. Democrats project onto others their own sins, whether it’s Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia, Jay Jones, trying to make a political case about gun violence by talking about putting bullets in the head of a Republican political opponent, or alleged bank fraudster Letitia James going after a former president for non-existent bank fraud.
I’m seeing a pattern.
Letitia will continue to pound the table because the table is all she’s got. Certainly not the facts or the law.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 39 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)