This week, federal prosecutors brought charges against another one of President Donald Trump's political enemies. After interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan secured a grand jury indictment against former FBI Director James Comey two weeks ago, Halligan obtained another indictment, this time against New York Attorney General Letitia James, on Thursday.

The indictment of James is every bit as lackluster as the one against Comey, if not more so. According to the indictment, a grand jury charged James with one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution. It states that in August 2020, James secured a mortgage from OVM Financial to purchase a property in Norfolk, Virginia. As part of the loan approval process, she signed a second home rider—which, in the language of the indictment, required her "as the sole borrower to occupy and use the property as her secondary residence, and prohibited its use as a timesharing or other shared ownership arrangement or agreement that requires her to rent the property or give any other person any control over the occupancy or use of the property."

"Despite these representations," the indictment claims the Norfolk property "was not occupied or used by JAMES as a secondary residence and was instead used as a rental investment property." It alleges that by claiming the property as a second residence, James qualified for a 3-percent interest rate, and if she had instead applied for a loan as an investment property, her "comparable investment property rate" would have been 3.815 percent; that reduction saved money in both interest and seller credit, "for total ill-gotten gains of approximately $18,933 over the life of the loan."

If the details of the case sound familiar, they should: As Andrew C. McCarthy notes at National Review, it's quite similar to a case James brought against Trump while he was out of office.

James sued Trump and his business associates in 2022 "for years of financial fraud." She alleged the then-former president had routinely overstated the value of his commercial assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. Last year, a judge ordered Trump and his co-defendants to pay $464 million, though a state appeals court later overturned the judgment amount.

"On its face, a penalty of nearly half a billion dollars is hard to fathom given that no lender or insurer claimed it suffered a financial loss as a result of the transactions at the center of the case," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote at the time. "But the law under which James sued Trump and his co-defendants does not require any such loss."

The indictment against James includes a forfeiture notice. "Yes, Uncle Sam is coming after this master criminal's 'ill-gotten gains'—all of $18,933," writes McCarthy. "That works out to about $600 per year (that's hundred, not hundred million) over the life of the loan in question."

And yet that penny-ante violation could potentially carry real consequences. "If convicted, Letitia James faces penalties including up to 30 years in prison per count, up to a $1 million fine on each count, and forfeiture," the Justice Department declared in its announcement. "In reality," McCarthy adds, "James faces little or no jail time—though, if convicted, she would probably have to fork over that $18,933 (with interest!)."

Even at this early stage, the case already appears flimsy. The paragraph explaining the second home rider "characterizes the agreement rather than quoting it, an odd choice in this context," defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Ken White wrote on BlueSky. "Also note that the indictment claims she rented the property but not that she entered into an agreement that REQUIRED her to rent the property, which seems to be what is prohibited by the paraphrased language."

"Prosecutors don't even bother to allege she ever entered into such an arrangement," Lawfare's Molly Roberts agrees, citing copies of documents released earlier this year. "All they allege is that she rented out the property, and that she didn't personally use it. That behavior, the rider doesn't prohibit."

Prosecutors clearly saw an indictment of James as an end goal and merely back-filled a path to get there. In fact, for the past few months, it seemed more likely that James would be indicted over the mortgage on a separate Norfolk property: In an April 2025 criminal referral letter to the Justice Department, Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, singled out a Norfolk house James had helped her niece purchase.

In this way, it looks to be every bit as flimsy, yet punitive, as the case against Comey. Halligan reportedly didn't even notify Attorney General Pam Bondi beforehand, according to CNN.

"Halligan presented the case against James to a grand jury in Alexandria, [Virginia,]" The Washington Post reported. "It is unusual for a politically appointed top U.S. attorney to present a case herself, suggesting that the office struggled to find a career attorney willing to take on the assignment. A senior career attorney in the office indicated to her staff in recent days that she believed the case was weak and did not want to present it to a grand jury." Halligan also presented Comey's case herself—her first ever appearance before a grand jury.

Trump seems to be getting revenge on his political opponents, as he long vowed he would do once back in office. It's the latest instance of Trump, a longtime critic of government weaponization, suddenly finding much to like about it now that he was the one holding the reins of power.

The post Trump's Case Against Letitia James Looks a Lot Like the Case She Brought Against Him appeared first on Reason.com.

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… is from page 402 of The Thomas Sowell Reader (2011):

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

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… is from page 325 of Gordon Wood’s great 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution:

In the end, no banks, no government, no institutions could have created the American economic miracle of these years. America suddenly emerged a prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society not because the Constitution was created or because a few leaders formed a national bank, but because ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and “get ahead.” Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money. “Enterprise,” “improvement,” and “energy” were everywhere extolled in the press.

DBx: Note that Wood could have added also that this growth was not due to protective tariffs.

Wood’s observation about American history lends further credence to Deirdre McCloskey’s thesis that pro-commercial ideas – and, importantly, favorable talking and writing about commerce and market-tested innovation – are the chief source of what Adam Smith called “the wealth of nations.”

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The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal explains what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining: America makes immigrants better, and immigrants make America better. Two slices:

Welcoming immigrants to the U.S. is out of fashion on the political right these days, even for those who enter the U.S. legally. That’s short-sighted for America’s future prosperity, as this week’s news about the annual Nobel prize winners in the sciences shows again.

Six U.S. residents are among the nine winners in this year’s three Nobel science categories, and three of those six are immigrants. Three U.S.-based professors swept the physics prize, including Michel Devoret, an immigrant from France, and John Clarke, who came to the U.S. from the United Kingdom. They shared the prize with native-born American John Martinis for “quantum mechanical tunnelling.”

Omar Yaghi, an immigrant from Jordan, shared the prize in chemistry with an Australian and a Japanese national. They won for what the Nobel committee called “the development of metal-organic frameworks.”

…..

Some of our readers will sniff that these are mere anecdotes and say the Trump White House supports legal immigration. Sorry, anecdotes matter because the contributions of individuals matter. And the restrictionists in the White House are trying to shrink even legal immigration too.

See its plan to make H-1B visas too expensive for all but the largest companies, and the campaign to reduce the number of foreign students at U.S. universities. This year’s Nobelists, like winners every year, were attracted to the U.S. in part because of the opportunities at great research universities. One inevitable if hard-to-calculate price of the Trump campaigns against immigration and the U.S. academy is that an unknown number of future potential prize winners will choose to study elsewhere, or return home after they have a degree.

Nobel prizes in the sciences are the result of intellectual capital built over decades of hard work and research. The U.S. will get fewer in the future if the Trump Administration won’t welcome legal immigrants and refugees.

Also explaining what shouldn’t – but, alas, what today nevertheless does – need explaining (this time about the damage done by rent control) is Kevin Lavery.

Scott Lincicome tweets:

Well well well: “Trump Excludes Generics From Big Pharma Tariff Plan”

Good news for American consumers (patients), but a major Trump reversal on generics and an admission that his tariffs do, in fact, raise US prices.

GMU Econ alum Adam Michel details “six reasons not to extend Obamacare subsidies.” (HT David Henderson)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) powerfully argues that “the Constitution does not allow the president to unilaterally blow suspected drug smugglers to smithereens.” A slice:

Critics of this whole terrorist labelling charade, such as Matthew Petti at Reason, explain that: “In practice, that means that a ‘terrorist’ is whoever the executive branch decides to label one.”

While no law dictates such, once people are labelled as terrorists, they appear to no longer be eligible for any sort of due process.

The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd, at this point, will loudly voice their opinion that people in international waters whom we label as terrorists deserve no due process. Vice President Vance asserts: “There are people who are bringing—literal terrorists—who are bringing deadly drugs into our country.”

Which, of course, raises the questions:

1. Who labelled them and with what evidence?
2. What are their names, and what specifically shows their membership and guilt?

The blow-them-to-smithereens crowd also conveniently ignores the fact that death is generally not the penalty for drug smuggling.

George Will warns of the dangers posed to the world by Vladimir Putin. A slice:

Poland and Romania have experienced harassing drones. In multiple instances, “shadow ships” (worldwide, the “shadow fleet” of ships that conceal their identities and activities numbers about 1,000) have been accused of cutting undersea cables crucial to Europe commercial and military infrastructure.

Jack Nicastro reminds us that government isn’t the only source of economic data.

Historian David Beito looks back on FDR’s authoritarian use of government ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum to violate Americans’ First Amendment rights. A slice:

Prior to the 1927 creation of the Federal Radio Commission (the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC), radio was arguably freer than the printing press. Short-range audio broadcasts not only gave listeners mass entertainment but also provided a way to share and access diverse opinions: socialists, labor unions, religious evangelists, and political populists. Well-publicized problems of interference between frequencies were often engineered politically to bolster calls for regulation, but court rulings were sorting through confusion. Affirming the doctrine of prior use, courts were able to determine de facto ownership in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Roosevelt was determined to silence dissenting voices on the radio. He adeptly manipulated the revolving door of regulators and industry executives and executed behind-the-scenes intrigue using intermediaries to conceal the appearance of censorship while embracing its effects.

By 1933, big broadcasters eagerly aligned themselves with the new administration, and in many cases became regulators themselves. Former FRC commissioner — CBS vice president — Henry A. Bellows was a Democrat and Harvard classmate of FDR’s. In his official role, he promised to reject any broadcast “that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration,” and announced that all stations were “at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration.” Bellows specified that CBS had a duty to support the president, right or wrong, and privately assured presidential press secretary Stephen Early that “the close contact between you and the broadcasters has tremendous possibilities of value to the administration, and as a life-long Democrat, I want to pledge my best efforts in making this cooperation successful.”

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