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Will Haines: Today on Sekulow, we have breaking news as a whistleblower exposed potential corruption in Letitia James' office. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. We want to hear from you. Share and post your comments or call 1-800-684-3110. And now, your host... Welcome to Sekulow. Will Haines here, joined by Jordan Sekulow momentarily. But this is a big one. This is out of the Times Union newspaper, which serves the capital area of New York. Reported on this yesterday afternoon and it's already making waves. A New York prosecutor and assistant attorney general in the office of the New York Attorney General is claiming that Letitia James' office, the Attorney General of New York, directed him to target President Trump as well as President Trump's people within his circle. And here's what it is. It was an email sent to the entire agency saying that he had been directed specifically by the Investor Protection Bureau Chief, who is his boss, to target Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (which is in the middle of a merger that needs DOJ approval) without having a credible reason for targeting these organizations or individuals. This email went to 2,000 people in the office of the Attorney General. Then, all of a sudden, it started vanishing from people's inboxes. They later got an agency-wide email from the general counsel for Letitia James, the Attorney General, and informed employees that there was an internal matter and that no one in the office was in danger, according to three people familiar with the communication. We also see what this individual wrote in the email that said, "If you believe Trump is using the DOJ attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interest, you should find it equally troubling that Tish James, their boss, the Attorney General of New York, is doing exactly the same thing." He wrote, "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." Folks, this is a whistleblower within the New York Attorney General's office. There is a lot to discuss here. So I want to hear from you. Call 1-800-684-3110. Is this surprising that the Attorney General of New York is targeting her political enemies, or is it to be expected from this office? Call me at 1-800-684-3110. The ACLJ already has our attorneys working on this. Jordan will be with me in the next segment to discuss all of this and how you can get involved along with the ACLJ. But it's quite shocking to read those words from an assistant attorney general, Daniel Weisenfeld, in the New York Attorney General's office, saying, "I ask you not to serve as Tish's personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies." We knew all along that was her goal. She said it when she campaigned to be the Attorney General of New York. We know that she found a way to bring a civil suit against the President in New York. At the same time, she was accused of doing actual mortgage fraud in Virginia with that house in Norfolk, in Brooklyn. We're going to break it all down in the next segment and Jordan will be joining me on air, 1-800-684-3110 to join me on air. And I want to say thank you to our ACLJ champions and members. You came through in a big way in August. Not just for the ACLJ, but also for our clients. The support that you showed during our impact match was great. It will enable the ACLJ to keep fighting in so many crucial fights across the country. So thank you for your support. We'll be right back with more on Sekulow.
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Will Haines: Welcome back to Sekulow. We're breaking this down for you as this assistant attorney general in the New York Attorney General's office, Letitia James—you've heard of her, maybe, on this broadcast for years, as she ran on going after President Trump, successfully got a verdict in New York court about a civil case where it was trying to say that he defrauded banks by overvaluing things on paper. Meanwhile, she did that exact thing, but in order to get more favorable mortgage rates when it comes to properties in Norfolk, Virginia, Brooklyn, New York, but nothing to see there. We know that it has been her goal publicly to get the President. But to some degree, you still think it's political rhetoric, there's no one inside her AG's office actually saying it. You can create that culture without having to actually give those directives. Well, what we're seeing according to this assistant attorney general Daniel Weisenfeld, is that he sent an agency-wide email on Friday—and agency meaning office of 2,000 people—and said, "Hey, guess what? Letitia James and my boss here in the Investor Protection Bureau aren't focusing on the right things. They're just saying get Trump and his allies. They're making political enemies lists and asking for them to find crimes to fit the people."
Jordan Sekulow: That's right. I mean when you look at this that you say, we want you to focus your time here. So he laid it out. He said, go after Trump himself, go after Truth Social, go after Hewlett Packard because Trump DOJ approved that merger. So we want to look at that too. And again, they had no credible reason. So they just got a list of here's the people or companies that have been associated with President Trump. So you've got the social media company, you've got a tech company, and President Trump himself. And the list went on. And then there wasn't any reason given. There wasn't like, usually when you start these investigations it's because of a reason. Someone like a whistleblower comes to you from inside a company. You're doing the normal kind of due diligence and maybe a different division within the New York government says we believe there's been a tax issue. The tax division could bring it to the Attorney General's office. Those would be normal courses: investigators, the police, security services that are looking at financial transactions, all of that. And what we see here is an assistant AG saying, "We didn't get any of that information. We had nothing to start with. It wasn't like, hey, because Donald Trump did X, Y, and Z, we would like you to look at A, B, and C. It was, let's see if you can find anything illegal that we could sue Donald Trump over." And you mentioned the one case they were able to bring over property, which again is one that is on hold now as we speak because the President is the President. You can't keep those lawsuits have to all stall out while he's President of the United States. But this again shows that this is continuing. Because this is an email that went out on Friday. Not Friday three years ago, but Friday last week. Just a handful of days ago. And you know that this assistant AG in New York likely is probably not a huge Trump supporter, maybe they are, but the system inside New York in the Attorney General's office, especially under Letitia James and these appointees to get to that level, would be people that would be vetted, people that would be brought in because they share the same ideas. It's not supposed to be about politics in the Attorney General's office, but let's get truthful: they run as politicians. So usually they would share the same political ideas as well. That being said, that should all be able to be true and you don't make a political enemies list to prosecute. And President Trump and this DOJ has gotten a lot of flak for investigating former officials who appeared targeted the Trump administration unlawfully, and they are being targeted with a saying, oh that is some kind of a list of those we just want to get, that's just our political opponent that we want to take down. No, it was people that they believed were engaged in wrongdoing. They made the FBI and DOJ look bad. They've really tarnished the reputation of the Department of Justice and the IRS and others. We've seen that happen. And so you look at the Jim Comeys. You look at what they did. You look at former CIA directors and national security. And decide marching into the White House without any approval to sit down and talk to send FBI agents in to talk to staff that had been there for 48 hours because you knew they weren't the typical Washington insiders that would have the stonewalls in place for your FBI agents to be stopped at the door. Jim Comey did that. That's worthy of an investigation. He admitted to doing it. So why not be able to investigate? If you tweet out and search out what it means to get rid of somebody...
Will Haines: Right. 86 47.
Jordan Sekulow: Yeah, right. And you're looking at whether or not I should send that. Hey, you can investigate that when you're talking about the President of the United States and that means removing them and that means getting rid of them. And a lot of other people would read that as a much more of a threat or a call to action as a threat. So those are not investigating political opponents just because. You're investigating them for a reason. And here I think this assistant Attorney General Will, his issue was not probably that it was Donald Trump or Hewlett Packard, it was that they were just being told by their higher-ups, "Go after these people and that's it." They didn't have a briefing paper of research. They didn't have another agency that gave them hundreds of pages from the FBI that said this is what we found, or the New York Bureau of Investigation, the New York tax authority, anything like that to say that we feel like there's been a violation of law for these individuals that were listed or corporations that were listed. That would have probably been a very different—it might not have even been right then—but it would have been very different. This is like the worst of the worst is when you have an assistant AG say, "They just gave us political targets to go after."
Will Haines: Right, right. Once again, we assumed they were politically targeting people, but not this explicit. This raw, just from your boss: "Go see if you can find something we can bring a lawsuit against Donald Trump personally, against his company, or against any kind of businesses that did work with that Trump administration." Here's what's wild about this as well. Once again, he says in this email, "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 harkens back to Joseph Stalin's chief of his secret police who once said famously, "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime." He's saying, don't be like Joseph Stalin's regime here, which is wild. But then you get further down into this. Why is he doing this? Once again, when you look at state's attorneys general's office, you think about there were 2,000 people that received this email. There are going to be people even if it's run by someone who won the office that you disagree with politically, someone like Letitia James. There are going to be people that believe in the rule of law in these offices. And we have represented whistleblowers here at the ACLJ. We know what they put them through. How they try to completely starve them out, literally, by cutting off their pay and any sort of being able to get income for their family if they are a whistleblower. Here, Letitia James' office said he's on leave with pay. But he opened the email with this—and it's going to have to be edited—but he said the best part of having a lot of money (and it was a lot more colorful than that) is being able to tell the truth without fear of consequences, so here we go. He was projecting that there's a lot of other people that believe this, that see the wrong that's happening in this office. "I'm financially secure enough"—he's only been assistant attorney general here for two years. I don't know his background. I don't know if he was in private practice, made a lot of money, wanted to go work for the government or what, but he is saying, "I'm not concerned about losing my job, so I'm going to speak truth now." And part of what he was concerned about is that Letitia James' office was, quote, "using significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies" while taking no action against, quote, "rampant non-profit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues." These are two issues here at the ACLJ we talk about almost every single day, definitely every week. One, crime, antisemitic crime that's going on—they're not focusing on, he says that—and also the fraud, the use of taxpayer money in charities that are taking grants to have things like homeless shelters that are defrauding the taxpayer. They're not spending the time going after these two items because they're too busy going after convenient public enemies. That's why, and we're going to get into it more in the next segment, we are filing a state FOIL request (that's Freedom of Information Law in New York) to get to the bottom of this because we know there were records generated; they just tried to delete them.
Jordan Sekulow: That's right. They've got his—and we've got the email. So the email, people have it even though they deleted it from the servers. We have the names. A lot of times you don't get the names, Will. We already have the names, so we've got a head start here in this freedom of information request to New York. A bigger head start than we usually get. We have the specific targets. We have that there was no reasoning. We know who told the attorney to do this. And more names keep coming out as we speak on the show today. Give us a call at 1-800-684-3110. Let us know what you think. It's starting to unravel at an interesting time.
Will Haines: That's right. And folks, once again, we want to thank you for your support in the month of August. You made everything we do possible, and so we want to say thank you. We're breaking this down for you as this whistleblower from the New York Attorney General's office came forward and alleges that the office is focused not on things that they should be, such as homeless shelter fraud where people are abusing the system, fraudulently taking either taxpayer dollars or public dollars, donations, and not fulfilling the services. He calls that a rampant issue, as well as antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues. Those things are being ignored while the Attorney General of New York and her deputies are targeting convenient public enemies at significant public taxpayer expense. Jordan, we're finding more as we go. There's a new interesting article the New York Post just dropped as we're going along—this drip, drip, drip is happening—but the Investor Protection Bureau Chief, who was the boss of this assistant attorney general, has a history of not liking Trump as well.
Jordan Sekulow: Oh yeah. So she was at the DOJ before becoming this guy's boss and the head of the Investor Protection Bureau, which again that's why they would have overseen any business transactions like the HP transaction that he listed in the email as just, hey, we need to go after HP just because they didn't like the fact that the merger or the proposed merger, and that the Trump administration was okay with that. President Trump personally in a financial capacity and others associated with President Trump. Well, she was actually at DOJ. Now, in 2021 was when she filed the complaint, but in 2017—so just a year after President Trump takes office—she was let go from the DOJ. She filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination that was settled under the Biden administration's DOJ. So as the court case went, we have no idea how the court case was going for her or whether or not it was likely she was going to be successful. But the Biden administration settled it for nearly $800,000—$795,000 to be exact. And she picks up this job in Letitia James' Attorney General's office in New York at the same time. So she goes right from the DOJ, has a partisan and a personal... so she's got this personal ongoing battle with the President and the President's administration. So you see why it's bigger than just Trump and why that list of people that he put out wasn't just going after President Trump. It was anyone associated with and any companies associated with that might have benefited because of a policy decision from the President. And then she gets picked up by this office and that's the attorney, the head of the Investor Protection Bureau, that is the director who told this assistant AG to go after Trump. So she kept this ongoing, and that's again, you've got to start putting all these pieces together. This is someone again who had a personal and likely political vendetta against the President, got one of those solved by the four years during the Biden administration and a settlement because she didn't have to fight out the case. They just paid her to settle it. We have no idea if she would have won that case or what she alleged.
Will Haines: Even the timeline of that, Jordan. She didn't bring it until it was a different Attorney General. She was let go in December of 2017. So while that was in the first full year of President Trump's term, she did not file it until the first year of Biden's term. The case wasn't filed until 2021 and then it was settled in 2023. So six years after she was let go is when it was settled. But it was four years after she was let go before she even brought the case. There was a change of administration. And you see, we talk about lawfare. Lawfare is not quick because the legal system acts slowly, and you can wait years sometimes. You have different statutes of limitations to bring different allegations and charges and complaints as she did. So she waited. She said, "I'm not going to do this against the DOJ I just got fired from. I'm going to wait until maybe there's a friendly DOJ and they'll just settle it, right?" Because they're not going to want to fight me over these issues that I'm alleging even if I'm incorrect. And the one she's seeking—she knows the DOJ, $800,000 is a lot of individual money, but it's nothing when it comes to the Department of Justice budget, especially to settle something like this. And I can go get a job with my friend Letitia James being the head of the Investor Protection Bureau, which is a huge part of the New York Attorney General's office because of where it's located: in the financial district, that office in New York City where most of the biggest financial transactions are going through in the world. So I'm going to let some people in on a little inside baseball here about how the ACLJ works. As so many of you supported this work in August and we're so thankful for you standing with us. Yesterday afternoon, this article comes out. This is from a small local newspaper in the capital region of New York. I see it. What's the first thing I do? One, I think we've got a lead for the show tomorrow. But the second thing I do is I send it immediately to Jordan and Jay. And I say, look at this, very interesting. Knowing they know exactly what to do. And what is the first thing you and your dad both immediately said? We need to get a state version of the FOIA, which is in this case it's called FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) in New York. There's clearly records there because there was an email on a government server that was then deleted. So they get our attorneys, give them their marching orders immediately, start saying, get this, we've got to get it out fast because we already know they're taking steps to getting things deleted off their server.
Jordan Sekulow: That's right. They are taking things off the servers so what we have now is probably what we will have. It's whatever that attorney who got put on leave took with him that was printed or saved somewhere else, because they went into the server and removed this email. It went to every single employee of the New York State Attorney General's office. They tried to reply-all as they were removing the email and say it was an internal matter, that it had to do with an employee, and that they were going to investigate it that way. Of course they try to say no one should be worried or concerned. I guess maybe people were worried or concerned that they were violating the law based off what he was saying, or potentially at least violating legal ethics, which could get you disbarred and get you in serious trouble or an investigation by the DOJ—the big DOJ—into the New York Attorney General's office about whether they are unlawfully, politically targeting their enemies, their political enemies. I mean, so again, when you have someone like this—and this is not an unnamed whistleblower. This is not someone who came and said, "Oh, I'm just going to come, I want to have that protection of immunity, I don't want people to know my name, unnamed." No, this person is named. They knew they'd be named. They knew they'd be retaliated against. Now they're still being paid—that limits some of their ability to speak, they do put that at risk if they do talk. But again, when you read this, you realize this is someone who—I have no idea where their politics are—someone who was pushed and pushed and felt like they were being told to find crimes for people because their bosses didn't like the politics those people or companies may have benefited from in some way, and they didn't say in any kind of illegal way. And they said they were given no reason. So they weren't provided a report that says, "Hey, like we did from this." It wasn't like we just said we're going to talk about Letitia James today because we feel like talking about Letitia James. No, we're doing it because there's a report. Something came out, a whistleblower who put out email to the entire—that's pretty high up—to the entire New York AG's office accusing the AG and her top deputies of politically targeting, using lawfare, their political enemies.
Will Haines: That's right. And if you have questions about this, because we get results, we've actually seen a lot more results in this era of going directly to the states because that's where a lot of these issues are happening at this point. But if you've got questions, call us: 1-800-684-3110. We've got a lot more ahead. We're going to keep breaking this down. We have Jeff Ballabon joining us in segment five as well. But call us at 1-800-684-3110 to talk to us on air.
Guest (Male): For decades now, the ACLJ has been on the front lines protecting your freedom, defending your rights in court, in Congress, and in the public arena. The American Center for Law and Justice is on your side. If you're already a member, thank you. And if you're not, well this is the perfect time to stand with us at aclj.org where you can learn more about our life-changing work. Become a member today. ACLJ.org.