For years, conservatives have argued that New York Attorney General Letitia James built her political career on a promise to go after Donald Trump by any means necessary, facts be damned. Now, a prosecutor from inside her own office has put that accusation in writing, and the fallout has been swift.
Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, who works in the office’s Investor Protection Bureau, sent an agency-wide email Friday to hundreds of colleagues alleging that his bureau chief, Shamiso Maswoswe, directed him to pursue President Trump, his social media platform Truth Social, and the Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks merger without what he called a credible basis for targeting any of them.
According to a copy of the email obtained by the Times Union, Wiesenfeld did not mince words. He accused the office of choosing political targets first and searching for crimes second, rather than the other way around, a description that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the yearslong legal war James has waged against Trump since before she even took office.
The email was reportedly deleted from the agency’s servers within hours. A follow up message was sent to staff by Kumiki Gibson, James’ general counsel, describing the episode as an internal personnel matter, a characterization that conveniently avoids engaging with the substance of the allegations themselves.
The Attorney General’s office issued a statement calling it a personnel matter and insisting the agency is committed to upholding New York law and protecting the rights of all New Yorkers regardless of political beliefs. That statement notably did not deny the specific claim that Wiesenfeld was instructed to target Trump affiliated individuals and organizations without probable cause.
This is not the first time James has faced accusations of running a politically motivated operation against the president. She campaigned for attorney general in 2018 on an explicit promise to investigate Trump’s business dealings, telling voters at the time that nobody, meaning Trump specifically, is above the law. That is not a subtle dog whistle. It was a campaign pledge to use the power of the office against a single political figure before any investigation had even identified a specific crime.
She appeared to follow through in 2024, when a Manhattan judge ordered Trump, his two sons, and a former Trump Organization official to pay more than 360 million dollars in a civil fraud case, based on allegations that Trump overstated the value of his properties in financial documents used to secure loans. Trump appealed, and in August 2025 a New York appellate court upheld the underlying verdict while tossing out the massive financial penalty entirely, a significant blow to the credibility of the original judgment.
Wiesenfeld’s email did not stop at Trump. He also criticized the office for what he described as insufficient action on real fraud involving nonprofit homeless shelters and on antisemitic crimes occurring near synagogues, issues he suggested deserved far more attention than a politically driven pursuit of Trump linked entities. That is a pointed criticism from inside the building, not from a partisan outsider with an axe to grind.
According to reporting from the Gateway Pundit, Wiesenfeld’s email opened with a blunt declaration that he had the freedom to speak honestly without fear of consequences, before laying out a detailed account of what he described as James’ pattern of framing Trump. He reportedly urged his colleagues not to act as personal attorneys for James by chasing her political enemies, and instead to prosecute actual crimes and identify the people responsible for them, rather than picking targets first and hunting for violations afterward.
It is worth remembering that the Justice Department has separately pursued criminal investigations into James herself during Trump’s second term, including allegations of mortgage and bank fraud. Those cases were reportedly shopped to multiple federal prosecutors before ultimately being thrown out by federal judges. Whatever one thinks of how that investigation was handled, it illustrates just how deep the mutual distrust between James and the Trump administration has become.
Wiesenfeld is described in reporting as a veteran prosecutor who previously worked in Brooklyn before joining the attorney general’s office. He is not some junior staffer looking to make a name for himself. His email carries the weight of someone with institutional knowledge of how prosecutorial decisions are supposed to be made, and his allegation is precisely the kind of claim that should trigger serious oversight, not a quietly deleted email and a bland statement about personnel matters.
Conservative outlets were quick to highlight the story, and for good reason. This is not an anonymous tip or a leaked rumor. It is a named prosecutor, still employed by the office in question, putting his allegations in writing and sending them to hundreds of his own colleagues, fully aware of the risk that decision carried for his career.
The optics here are difficult for James to escape. Her office spent years building a national profile around the pursuit of Trump, and now one of her own prosecutors is on record saying that pursuit was, at least in this instance, driven by political targeting rather than evidence of wrongdoing. That is exactly the accusation Trump and his allies have made for years, and it did not come from a Trump aligned pundit. It came from inside James’ own bureau.
Predictably, the attorney general’s office has tried to frame this as a narrow internal dispute rather than a matter of public accountability. But when a state prosecutor alleges that political appointees are directing investigations at private citizens and companies without a credible basis, that is not simply a personnel issue to be handled quietly behind closed doors. It touches directly on whether New Yorkers can trust that their attorney general’s office pursues justice rather than headlines.
It also raises uncomfortable questions about the Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks merger reference in Wiesenfeld’s email. That deal had already received federal approval through the normal regulatory process. If Wiesenfeld’s account is accurate, it suggests the office may have been looking for a pretext to revisit a legitimate, federally sanctioned business transaction simply because of its perceived connection to Trump world, a troubling use of state power against private enterprise.
James has built much of her political identity around opposing Trump since 2018, and Trump has returned the hostility in kind over the years, at one point accusing her publicly of doing little more than ranting and politicking against him. Their feud has now stretched across two presidential terms, multiple civil suits, appellate reversals, and now allegations of prosecutorial overreach from within her own office.
For New York taxpayers, the real cost of this ongoing political battle deserves scrutiny. Wiesenfeld pointed to genuine public safety concerns, fraud against vulnerable homeless populations and rising antisemitic incidents near houses of worship, that he believes have been shortchanged while resources were allegedly redirected toward pursuing what he called convenient political targets. If true, that represents a serious misallocation of prosecutorial priorities at a time when New Yorkers are dealing with very real crime and safety concerns.
