Justice Dept. investigating NY attorney general who has targeted Trump

NEW YORK — The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into real estate transactions involving New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to a person familiar with the case — the first known criminal probe of a law enforcement official who took action against President Donald Trump.

A grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has issued subpoenas over a mortgage application in which James attested that she intended to make a single-family home in Norfolk her primary residence, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. James’s signature appears at the bottom of a two-page document granting power of attorney to her niece, Shamice Thompson-Hairston, to execute the purchase, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

James has joined other Democratic state attorneys general to file multiple lawsuits against both Trump administrations, halting some of the president’s key initiatives. She also sued Trump and the Trump Organization over allegations of faulty business practices, winning a massive judgment last year that totaled in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Trump is appealing.

The probe of James’s real estate dealings follows a criminal referral that William J. Pulte, Trump’s appointee as director of the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last month. It alleges that James “falsified bank documents and property records to acquire government backed assistance and loans and more favorable loan terms.”

Citing “media reports,” Pulte accused James of lying on the 2023 loan document by saying the Norfolk house would be her principal residence even as she served as attorney general in New York. Pulte also alleged James misrepresented the number of units in a brownstone she’s owned in Brooklyn since 2001, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Post.

James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, wrote a letter to Bondi in response to the criminal referral saying any errors by his client were essentially paperwork mistakes.

“This appears to be the political retribution President Trump threatened to exact that AG Bondi assured the Senate would not occur on her watch,” Lowell said in a statement Thursday, referring to promises Bondi made during her Senate confirmation hearing. “If prosecutors are genuinely interested in the truth, we are prepared to meet false claims with facts.”

Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.

Some details of the investigation were reported earlier by the Guardian and the Albany Times Union.

The letter from Pulte, formerly a private-equity executive and the grandson of a major American home builder, said James may have violated several federal laws, including a statute that criminalizes making any false claims to a mortgage lender. “Primary residence mortgages receive more favorable loan terms, including lower interest rates, than secondary residence mortgages,” Pulte wrote, noting that the former Democratic state’s attorney in Baltimore, Marilyn Mosby, was convicted last year under the statute.

Lowell’s letter said Pulte had “cherry-picked” one mistake in an application package that, he said, included other documents in which James stated multiple times that she would not be residing in the Norfolk home.

“Director Pulte … absolutely ignored her very clear and all caps statement two weeks earlier to the mortgage loan broker that ‘[t]his property WILL NOT be my primary residence[.] It will be Shamice’s primary residence,’” Lowell wrote, adding that James was only trying to help her niece make a down payment. “In the hundreds of pages that comprise the Norfolk loan application and other mortgage documents, Director Pulte points to a two-page power of attorney that was clearly mistaken and failed to reference Ms. James’ clear and repeated accurate statements.”

Trump allies also have alleged that James lied on the paperwork to get a first-time homebuyer benefit.

Addressing Pulte’s allegation about the Brooklyn townhouse, Lowell told Bondi that a 24-year-old certificate of occupancy listing five units in the property is irrelevant because many other and more current records provide the accurate count — four units. It is also accurate in official New York City property records, Lowell said, adding that records from a Queens property that belonged to James’s father incorrectly listed her as his spouse decades ago but was later fixed.

“The stunning hypocrisy of President Trump’s complaint that the Justice Department had been ‘politicized’ and ‘weaponized’ against him is laid bare as he and others in his Administration are now asking you to undertake the very same practice,” the letter said.

James has been the subject of Trump’s vitriol since at least 2018, when she was running for state attorney general. On the campaign trail, she promised voters that she would investigate the president — comments that Trump and his lawyers later brought up repeatedly to argue that she planned to target him unfairly.

She obtained a $450 million judgment against Trump last year in penalties plus interest for a long-running fraud scheme that involved purposely misrepresenting the value of properties and other assets to get better loan and insurance rates. New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron wrote in his February 2024 bench trial decision that Trump and company executives, including his two oldest sons, used “blatantly false financial data” in official dealings with lenders and insurance firms.

Trump accused James of manufacturing a case against him for political gain and with a desire to interfere in the 2024 election.

Since Trump returned to the White House in late January, James has been involved in several lawsuits against the administration, including challenges to the elimination of school grants and the attempt to end birthright citizenship. Her office also joined multiple lawsuits against the first Trump administration.

The president’s antagonism toward James has continued since his return to the White House. In March, he ordered agencies to revoke James’s security clearance and access to classified information. He called her “a total crook” during an appearance in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Bondi — who vowed in her Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year, that “politics will not play a part” in her decision-making — also singled out the New York attorney general in one of her first acts in office.

In a directive to staff, Bondi launched what she dubbed a “weaponization working group” to investigate instances of “politicized justice” during the administration of President Joe Biden. The order named James, along with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), and ordered prosecutors to investigate any role that federal authorities may have played in assisting their investigations of Trump.

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• Rizzo, Roebuck and Stein reported from Washington. Aaron Schaffer also contributed.