If you're going to pursue cases against a US President over relatively minor financial transgressions, you need to make sure your own past is clean.

Apparently Leticia James figured that nobody would uncover her own false statements to banks in the past, and now Trump is jumping on it.

The allegations seem pretty damning, although they involve a time period between 2 and 42 years ago.

In 1983 (when James was 25) and 2000, James purchased properties and stated a false husband on her mortgage application. The "husband" was actually her father, and being married increased her chance of being granted the loan. James is not accused of actually having been married to her father, but rather falsifying "husband" info in order to qualify for a loan which otherwise might have been rejected. At the time, she was not a public figure, and probably felt she'd get away with it.

In 2001, James purchased a 5-unit apartment building in Brooklyn, but listed it as having only having four units, both in building permit applications and mortgage documents. It is not clear how she benefited from this lie, but presumably there was some shady reason for it.

More recently, in 2023, she claimed that a Virginia home was her "primary residence" in order to get a favorable loan during a purchase from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This was while she was a NY State Prosecutor, where the requirement at the time was living primarily in the state of NY. This means that either she was violating NY law by being a Virginia resident while working as Prosecutor, or she lied on the loan application (the latter of course being the truth).

Similar to the Trump cases she prosecuted, James is not accused of actually stealing any money, but rather of lying to financial institutions in order to give herself opportunities which might have otherwise been denied.

James will not comment on any of it.

You can't even say that she stopped doing this stuff 24 years ago, because the 2023 allegation is more of the same thing.

Trump, of course, is thrilled to see this, and the feds are now appointing a special prosecutor. It is a crime to lie on financial institution documents when seeking loans or investment.

NY Post article: https://nypost.com/2025/04/16/us-new...-on-the-phone/