Zohran Mamdani, NYC electees bash Trump DOJ for Letitia James indictment

MANHATTAN (CN) — The Justice Department’s indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James is “an attack on our city,” frontrunner for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters on Friday.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee poised to lead City Hall in 2026, held a press conference alongside other elected officials just outside of the New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan — the same courthouse where James won a nearly $500 million civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump last year.

James’ federal indictment for bank fraud, Mamdani said, is “a shameless act of political retribution.”

“What Donald Trump has sought to do with taking over the federal government is to advance his own greed and his own agenda,” Mamdani said. “In pursuit of that advancement, he lays waste to our democracy.”

James was indicted Thursday in the Eastern District of Virginia after weeks of speculation that she would be the next Trump adversary charged by federal prosecutors. James, who drew Trump’s fury over a massive civil fraud judgment against him, which found that Trump inflated the value of his net worth to swindle banks into more favorable loans. James will appear in court later this month.

In recent weeks, Trump has openly used his sway over the Justice Department to pursue charges against his longtime critic.

“Nothing is being done,” Trump complained in a social media post from September, directly addressing U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and Leticia??? We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"

The Wall Street Journal has since reported that Trump meant to send that message to Bondi privately.

Last month, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “It looks to me like [James] is very guilty of something, but I really don’t know.” Soon after, he fired U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia for saying he couldn’t find probable cause to charge her.

Trump replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, who on Thursday delivered a two-count indictment accusing James of falsifying records to obtain favorable loans on a Norfolk, Virginia, home she bought in 2023.

“It’s thin,” Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney and former 2021 Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, said of the indictment at the Friday press conference. “Donald Trump made clear he had a vendetta. Everything that Attorney General Tish James did was by the book.”

Adrienne Adams — speaker of the New York City Council, a 2025 Democratic mayoral candidate and a longtime ally to James — called the indictment “political weaponization” when speaking alongside Wiley and Mamdani.

“We stand for someone and with someone who fights for democracy, who is the antithesis of Donald John Trump, who fights for lawlessness,” Adams said of her longtime friend.

James has vehemently denied the charges, calling them “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system” in a statement Thursday night.

The Justice Department claims she bought a three-bedroom home in 2020 for $137,000, financed with a $109,600 loan from Old Virginia Mortgage Company that required her to occupy the property as her second residence.

“Despite these representations, the Peronne property was not occupied or used by James as a secondary residence and was instead used as a rental investment property, renting the property to a family of three,” the department wrote. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties."

Speaking to Courthouse News on Friday, class action attorney Darren Kaplan of Kaplan Gore in Atlanta, Georgia, said the indictment seems like “incredibly small ball.” He estimated that, based on the indictment, prosecutors can only allege just over $2,000 of ill-gotten gains for James.

“I’ve never heard of a federal bank fraud prosecution for an amount this small,” Kaplan said. “It’s just absurd.”

The indictment comes two weeks after the Justice Department indicted another longtime political enemy of the president: former FBI Director James Comey, who prosecutors claim lied in congressional testimony when he claimed he didn’t authorize a colleague to leak information that wound up in a Wall Street Journal article.

Halligan brought that case, too. Comey pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.

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