Trump Official Urges Criminal Probe Of New York Attorney General, Who Calls Request 'retaliation'

In the summer of 2023, New York Attorney General Letitia James helped her niece buy a modest house in Norfolk, Virginia, by becoming a co-borrower on the mortgage loan.

A top housing official in the Trump administration has now seized on a document in that transaction to argue that James should be prosecuted for bank fraud, asking the U.S. Justice Department in a letter to open a criminal investigation into the Democrat.

The request for an investigation comes as the administration has pursued a campaign of retribution against President Donald Trump's longtime foes in the legal world. James won a 454 million judgment against Trump last year in a lawsuit claiming he had lied about the value of his assets on financial statements given to banks.

James called the allegations against her "baseless."

"It is nothing more than a headline, nothing more than retaliation against all the actions I have taken successfully against Donald Trump," she said Wednesday in an interview on the New York cable news station NY1.