A prosecutor inside Letitia James’s own office finally said the quiet part out loud. Find the crime later. Pick the enemy first.
Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor now assigned to the Investor Protection Bureau, sent an agency-wide email Friday to roughly 2,000 colleagues. The New York Post and Just the News report that the message was yanked from state servers almost as fast as it landed.
His boss, bureau chief Shamiso Maswoswe, had instructed him “to find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump.” The list was not subtle. Trump himself. Truth Social. Hewlett Packard, even after the Justice Department had already approved its $14 billion merger with Juniper Networks. No “credible reason,” Wiesenfeld wrote, for targeting any of them.
If you believe Trump is using the Department of Justice attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish is doing exactly the same thing.
Then the line that should end a career in any honest shop. “I ask that you not serve as Tish’s personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies. Instead, I hope you choose to prosecute crimes and find the individuals accountable, rather than targeting individuals and then finding crimes.”
That is not a policy disagreement. That is a confession of how the office works.
She Campaigned on the Vendetta
James did not hide this. In 2018 she promised to “prosecute the president for crimes committed in New York state.” She kept the promise. Her civil fraud case against Trump produced a grotesque penalty later stripped on appeal, leaving a liability finding without the half-billion-dollar scalp she wanted.
The man she ran against is now president again. Her office is still hunting his companies and his platform. Wiesenfeld’s email simply put the method on paper.
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed.
James’s spokesman, Alexis Richards, called it a “personnel matter,” parked Wiesenfeld on paid leave, and insisted the office enforces the law “regardless of political beliefs.” General counsel Kumiki Gibson followed with a staff note that this was “internal” and that nobody was “in danger.”
Sure. Delete the email, isolate the man who wrote it, and pretend the targeting order never happened. That is how bureaucracies treat inconvenient truth.
The Work She Will Not Do
Wiesenfeld named the cases her office would rather ignore. Rampant nonprofit homeless-shelter fraud. Antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues. Those are real victims. Those are actual crimes. They do not produce cable hits the way another Trump filing does.
The Post has already documented the rest of the record. New York ranks dead last among the states for Medicaid fraud indictments and convictions per billion spent, while billions walk out the door. GOP challenger Saritha Komatireddy, a career prosecutor who sent terrorists and drug traffickers to prison, has flagged more than $20 million in outside counsel for work a 2,000-person office exists to do, and at least $54 million in grants steered toward groups that treat police as the problem.
James prefers suing cops and chasing headlines. The streets and the synagogues can wait.
State GOP chairman Ed Cox put it cleanly. James “weaponized the attorney general’s office into a political hit squad and then tried to cover up her tracks.” Komatireddy’s spokesman, Nicole Kiprilov, said the alternative is simple. Lock up repeat offenders. Treat the homeless. Root out fraud. Stop picking targets by party.
November Is the Recourse
Wiesenfeld does not claim he sat in the room with James when the order was given. He claims his bureau chief told him to hunt Trump, Truth Social, and a merger the federal government had already blessed, and that the office burns public money on “convenient public enemies.”
Given James’s own campaign vow, the civil crusade, the press-release factory aimed at the White House, and the reflex to disappear the email, the chain of command is not a mystery.
Law enforcement that starts with a name and works backward to a statute is not law enforcement. It is a political weapon with a badge. New York has lived under that arrangement long enough. Voters get the last word in November. They should use it.
