There’s something almost comical about watching New York Attorney General Letitia James dance around a straightforward court order. Trump’s legal team filed a letter Thursday with the New York Supreme Court that cuts right through the noise. They want to know why James won’t confirm whether she’s preserved communications with Michael Cohen, the convicted perjurer who served as her star witness in the civil fraud case that nearly drained $464 million from Trump’s coffers.
This isn’t some frivolous fishing expedition. Cohen himself wrote on Substack in January that he felt “pressured and coerced” by James’s office to provide only the information that would satisfy their “desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement” against Trump. Read that again. The prosecution’s key witness is now saying the prosecution manipulated him. And James won’t say whether records of those meetings even exist, let alone whether they’ve been preserved as required by law.
The judge already ordered James to detail her preservation practices and efforts. Her response? A masterclass in bureaucratic evasion. She recited vague generalities about “standard litigation hold procedures” without actually confirming whether the requested materials exist or whether they’re being maintained. Trump’s attorneys nailed it in their filing when they noted that James “carefully avoids representing one way or the other” about the existence of these communications.
You know what this looks like? It looks like someone who promised to “find and pursue crimes” against Trump before she even knew what those crimes might be, as leaked emails from her office have already suggested. James campaigned on getting Trump. She made it central to her political identity. And now when pressed on whether she’s playing by the rules in court, she suddenly goes silent on the specifics.
The whole case reeks of selective enforcement and political vendetta. James accused Trump of inflating property values to secure better loan terms. Never mind that the banks testified they were sophisticated institutions that did their own due diligence and never lost a penny. Never mind that every real estate developer in Manhattan engages in similar valuation practices. James found her white whale and harpooned him with a $355 million penalty plus interest, a three-year ban on getting loans from New York banks, and prohibitions on running his own companies in the state.
An appeals court already vacated the monetary penalties, which tells you something about how shaky this case was from the start. But James appealed to reinstate them because apparently bankrupting a political opponent through lawfare is more important than equal application of the law.
Cohen’s credibility was already shot before this latest revelation. The man served prison time for lying to Congress and committed perjury during Trump’s criminal trial, according to numerous legal analysts. He’s admitted to stealing from the Trump Organization. His entire prosecution depended on his testimony, yet James won’t confirm whether records exist showing her office coached or coerced him into providing specific testimony.
This matters beyond Trump. If prosecutors can target individuals based on political animus, manufacture cases by pressuring witnesses, and then refuse to comply with basic discovery obligations, we don’t have a justice system. We have a weapon. And right now that weapon is pointed at a former president who happens to be the leading opposition candidate.
The principle here transcends party affiliation. Limited government means government that operates within defined constraints, including procedural fairness in legal proceedings. When attorneys general campaign on prosecuting specific individuals, then use their office to fulfill those campaign promises while dodging transparency requirements, they’ve perverted the entire concept of equal justice under law.
Trump’s team is right to push this. James needs to answer the question. Do these Cohen communications exist? Have they been preserved? What did her prosecutors tell Cohen in those meetings? These aren’t complicated questions. The silence is deafening and it smells like a cover-up.
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