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Will Haines: Today on Sekulow, a shocking revelation out of 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. Welcome to Sekulow, Will Haines here, and I want to wish all of you a very happy Labor Day weekend. It is the official end of summer for so many. Many of you are already back to school and many more of you are looking ahead to a new school year as well. But we are going to talk right now about what’s been happening in the New York Attorney General’s office. We mentioned in previous broadcasts about what’s been going on with this whistleblower that came forward and said that the boss at the Investor Protection Bureau in the New York Attorney General’s office was pushing attorneys and prosecutors to go after President Trump and go after allies of President Trump. It is very much a case of do as I say, not as I do when it comes to this Attorney General because she has been one of those people that has been saying, "President Trump making an enemies list, going after me for just following the law." Meanwhile, we know that this has been the MO from the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, who ran on getting President Trump, on going after him back in 2018. We know that there was that huge civil case that she brought against him that had to do with her saying that he overvalued properties like Mar-a-Lago, and therefore that was fraudulent because banks gave him loans. This was despite the banks testifying that they weren’t defrauded and he paid back these loans, so there was no issue there. Meanwhile, once again, she’s the one that there are questions that arose from getting favorable mortgage rates for properties in Norfolk, Virginia, and Brooklyn, New York. All that to say, it always seems to be do as I say, not as I do. The ACLJ got directly involved in this by sending a state FOIL request. You hear of a FOIA request, that’s Freedom of Information Act for the federal government. In New York, it’s a FOIL, Freedom of Information Law. We got it within 24 hours of this whistleblower news. We got a FOIL request to the New York Attorney General’s office to get information because of what happened. A whistleblower said, "Look, this is what they’re doing. They’re going after people, not crimes. This isn’t how it should work. Don��t be Letitia James’ personal attorney." All of a sudden, that email that went to 2,000 people started disappearing from people’s inboxes. Even if they’ve read it, it was gone. We want to know what happened. This harkens back to what we saw with the IRS scandal with Lois Lerner where emails just disappeared. Or maybe Hillary Clinton's emails. Private server in the bathroom, disappears. BleachBit became a word and a software that everyone knew because of missing emails. It always seems to be the emails, but we’re going to get to the bottom of this because we knew it was happening, but now people are coming forward and saying it’s happening. That’s not the way the legal system in this country should work.
Will Haines: Welcome back to Sekulow. We’re breaking this down for you as an Assistant Attorney General in the New York Attorney General’s office, Letitia James—you’ve heard of her on this broadcast for years—as she ran on going after President Trump. She 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 same thing but in order to get more favorable mortgage rates when it comes to properties in Norfolk, Virginia, and 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. You might think 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 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. When you look at this, you see that they 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 the Trump DOJ approved that merger, so we want to look at that too. Again, they had no credible reason. They just got a list of the people or companies that have been associated with President Trump. You’ve got the social media company, you’ve got a tech company, and President Trump himself. The list went on, and there wasn’t any reason given. Usually, when you start these investigations, it’s because of a reason. Someone like a whistleblower comes to you from inside a company, or 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. That would be the normal course. Investigators, the police, security services looking at financial transactions, all of that. What we see here is an Assistant AG saying they didn’t get any of that information. They had nothing to start with. It wasn’t like 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." You mentioned the one case they were able to bring over property, which is one that is on hold now as we speak because the President is the President. You can’t keep those lawsuits; they have to all stall out while he’s President of the United States. 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. This is a handful of days ago. 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. President Trump and this DOJ has gotten a lot of flak for investigating former officials who it appeared targeted the Trump administration unlawfully. They’re being targeted with 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. You look at the Jim Comeys. You look at what they did. You look at former CIA directors and National Security advisers and decide to march into the White House without any approval to sit down and 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. 86-45.
Jordan Sekulow: Right. And you’re looking at whether or not I should send that? You can investigate that when you’re talking about the President of the United States and that means removing them. That means getting rid of them. A lot of other people would read that as much more of a threat or a call to action as a threat. Those are not investigating political opponents just because. You’re investigating them for a reason. Here, I think this Assistant Attorney General's 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, or the New York tax authority. They didn't have 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 situation. It might not have even been right then, but it would be very different. This is like the worst of the worst when you have an Assistant AG say they just gave us political targets to go after.
Will Haines: Right. Once again, we assumed they were politically targeting people, but not this explicitly. The bosses were giving the marching orders: "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 is what’s wild about this as well. 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. When you look at states' attorneys general's offices, 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. 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 ability 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 by saying that 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 are a lot of other people that believe this, that see the wrong that’s happening in this office. He is saying, "I’m financially secure enough." He’s only been Assistant Attorney General here for two years. I don’t know his background, 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." Part of what he was concerned about is that Letitia James’ office was using significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies, while taking no action against rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and anti-Semitic crimes in and around synagogues. These are two issues here at the ACLJ we talk about almost every single day, definitely every week. One, anti-Semitic crime that’s going on—they’re not focusing on that, 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.
Jordan Sekulow: That’s right. We have 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. 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, and we know who told the attorney to do this. 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. 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. If you need help, the ACLJ is also here for you. Go to ACLJ.org/help and an attorney will be in touch with you if you feel like your constitutional rights are being violated.
Will Haines: Welcome back to Sekulow. 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 and fraudulently taking either taxpayer dollars or public donations and not fulfilling the services. He calls that a rampant issue. He also points to anti-Semitic 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 to significant public taxpayer expense. Jordan, we’re finding more as we go. There’s an interesting article the New York Post just dropped as we’re going along. This drip, drip, drip is happening. The Investor Protection Bureau chief, who was the boss of this Assistant Attorney General, has a history of not liking Trump as well. She was at the DOJ before becoming this guy’s boss and the head of the Investor Protection Bureau, which is why they would have overseen any business transactions like the Hewlett Packard transaction that he listed in the email as just something they need to go after because they didn’t like the fact that the Trump administration was okay with that proposed merger. She was actually at the DOJ. In 2021 was when she filed the complaint, but in 2017, 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. As the court case went, we have no idea how it 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. She goes right from the DOJ, and she has a partisan and a personal ongoing battle with the President and the President’s administration. 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 him and any companies associated with him that might have benefited because of a policy decision from the President. Then she gets picked up by this office. That’s the attorney, the head of that Investor Protection Bureau, that is the director who told this Assistant AG to go after Trump. She kept this ongoing, and 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.
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, 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.
Jordan Sekulow: 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." They’re not going to want to fight her over these issues that she's alleging even if she's incorrect. What 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 she can go get a job with her 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 in New York City where most of the biggest financial transactions are going through in the world.
Will Haines: 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. I said, "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 in this case is called FOIL, Freedom of Information Law, in New York. There are clearly records there because there was an email on a government server that was then deleted. They get our attorneys, give them their marching orders immediately, and start saying, "Get this. We’ve got to get it out fast." We already know they’re taking steps to get things deleted off their servers.
Jordan Sekulow: They are taking things off the servers. 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 political enemies. When you have someone like this, and this is not an unnamed whistleblower. This is not someone who came and said, "I want to have that protection of immunity, I don’t want people to know my name." 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 talk. But again, when you read this, you realize this is someone who—I have no idea where their politics are—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. They didn’t say in any kind of illegal way. They were given no reason. So they weren’t provided a report that says, "Hey, we did it because of this." No, we’re doing it because there’s a report. Something came out, a whistleblower who is pretty high up put out an email to the entire New York AG’s office accusing the AG and her top deputies of politically targeting using Lawfare their political enemies. If you have questions about this, call us at 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. Call us at 1-800-684-3110 to talk to us on air.