Adam Schiff, Letitia
James and Trump’s Payback Plan
Aug. 14, 2025
Mr.
Toobin is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Pardon: The
Politics of Presidential Mercy.”
President Trump’s
Justice Department recently reached a nadir when two prominent Democrats, New
York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff of California,
were placed under criminal investigation for their personal
financial dealings. They are the wrong targets chosen for the wrong reasons in
a case supervised by the wrong prosecutor. But there’s not much either of them
can do about it.
The process leading up
to the investigation demonstrates how this president has eroded longstanding
ethical norms governing the relationship between the White House and the
Justice Department. As the head of the executive branch, the president has
authority over all the agencies in his cabinet, including the Justice
Department; but since the abuses of Watergate, all subsequent presidents have
taken steps to remove themselves from individual prosecutorial decisions while
still leading on policy matters.
The Justice
Department manual instructs
that “the legal judgments of the Department of Justice must be impartial and
insulated from political influence. It is imperative that the department’s
investigatory and prosecutorial powers be exercised free from partisan
consideration.” To that end, the manual sharply restricts contacts between
prosecutors and the White House in criminal cases. With Mr. Trump using his
social media megaphone, those limits don’t exist.
Ms. James earned the president’s ire
by accusing him and the Trump Organization with fraud in connection with the
valuation of real estate and winning a $454 million judgment against them (Mr.
Trump is appealing). Mr. Schiff was a leader, in his days as a member of the
House of Representatives, of the investigation of Russia’s efforts to help Mr.
Trump win the 2016 election, and he became the lead House manager in Mr.
Trump’s first impeachment.
Among many other
insults, Mr. Trump has reposted a call for Ms.
James to be “placed under citizens arrest” for “blatant election interference
and harassment,” and over the years he’s denounced “Shifty
Schiff,” demanding that he be “questioned at the highest level for Fraud & Treason.”
If there were any doubt
that these investigations amount to political hit jobs against two of President
Trump’s most indefatigable political adversaries, the issue was settled with
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s pick to lead the inquiries — Ed Martin, the Justice
Department official who was so unqualified and partisan that he couldn’t win
confirmation in the Republican Senate to be the United States attorney in
Washington. As a consolation prize for that failure, Mr. Trump appointed him to
lead the so-called Weaponization Working Group, the Orwellian name for the
prosecutorial payback operation designed to build cases against those who
investigated Mr. Trump during the Biden administration. Some of Mr. Martin’s
first targets are Ms. James and Mr. Schiff. Far from displaying the open mind
that honorable prosecutors should demonstrate, Mr. Martin said his goal was to
“stick the landing”
against the two Democrats.
But a president’s
critics, like the president himself, should not be above the law, so what,
then, is the evidence against Ms. James and Mr. Schiff? For both, the issues
relate to real estate and mortgages, and the facts about them seem already well
established.
The case against Ms.
James has three parts, First, in 2023, she financed the down payment to help
her niece buy a single-family home in Norfolk, Va. According to her attorney
Abbe Lowell, Ms. James signed several
documents that made clear that her niece, not Ms. James herself, would live in
the house. But on one form, a power of attorney, she indicated that she herself
would live there, which was obviously a mistake. In light of the other
documents, the bank itself could not have been misled, and in any event, the
mistake on the power of attorney brought Ms. James no monetary gain.
In 2001, Ms. James bought a four-story
brownstone in Brooklyn with separate apartments for herself, her mother, her
brother and a family friend. On one form, filed 24 years ago, the property was
listed as having five units, not four. At all other times, she correctly listed
it as four units. Last, in 1983, Ms. James’s father bought a house in Queens
for the family. On the mortgage application, he mistakenly listed Ms. James,
who was just out of college, as his spouse, not his daughter, although other documents
listed their relationship correctly. Ms. James has denied any wrongdoing,
and according to her lawyer, the accusation that she may
have financially benefited is baseless.
In a demonstration of
the ferocity of the legal assault on Ms. James, her office was subpoenaed last
week in a different criminal investigation, led by Justice Department
prosecutors in upstate New York. This inquiry is apparently aimed at proving
that Ms. James committed some kind of misconduct during the fraud investigation
of Mr. Trump and his company, as well as in a separate lawsuit that her office
filed against the National Rifle Association. The only basis for this case, it
seems, is that the president was unhappy with the outcome of both cases, which
Ms. James’s office won.
As for Mr. Schiff, the
investigation of him is rooted in the fact that like many members of Congress,
he owns two residences, one in his home state of California and another in the
Washington suburbs. According to mortgage documents, Mr. Schiff listed both as
his “primary” residence, which, according to a social media post by the
president, represented an effort to “get a cheaper mortgage and rip off
America.” At the time Mr. Schiff applied for the mortgages, he was already in
Congress, so the banks knew he had two residences. There does not appear to be
any deception by Mr. Schiff and he has publicly denied the claims. (In
addition, Mr. Schiff apparently last applied for a mortgage in 2012, which
means any possible crime would be outside the 10-year statute of limitations;
that would probably apply to most of the charges against Ms. James as well.)
For the moment, Ms.
James and Mr. Schiff are essentially powerless. There is no remedy in federal
law to stop even clearly meritless investigations. At best, the two elected
officials can look forward to months of detailing their personal financial
arrangements; in other words, they will be compelled to violate the political
maxim that holds if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Worse yet, their legal
fates are in the hands of a dedicated political enemy who will be able to
present the case for indictment to a grand jury. There, in the famous utterance
of Sol Wachtler, the onetime chief judge of New York’s Court
of Appeals, prosecutors can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The
two elected officials will be able to offer formal legal and factual defenses
only after they are indicted — that is, when they are criminal defendants in
federal court, which is, to put it mildly, hardly a welcome forum.
President Trump has always been a
master of projection. His accusations of misconduct nearly always replicate
what he himself has done. So it is with “weaponization,” which is how he
describes the entirely legitimate efforts during the Biden years to hold him
accountable for his financial chicanery and his efforts to overturn his loss of
the 2020 election, among other misdeeds. Now, at his behest, his administration
is turning that word against two of his most prominent critics.
For Mr. Trump, there may be few spoils
of victory sweeter than the ordeal that Ms. James and Mr. Schiff will soon
endure.
