By: Reuven Yitzchak Epstein

For years, New York Attorney General Letitia James styled herself as the woman who would “get Trump.” She made no secret of it. On the campaign trail, she promised voters that she would be a “real pain in the ass” for the 45th president. She vowed to “sue him,” to make sure “he knows my name personally.” Those weren’t the words of a neutral prosecutor or a guardian of justice — they were the rallying cries of a political crusader.

Now, as The New York Post reported, James stands indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia for bank fraud and making false claims to a financial institution — charges that could send her to prison for decades. The irony is almost Shakespearean. The same woman who built her political fortune on the slogan “no one is above the law” now faces the very weight of the law she so zealously wielded against others.

For years, James turned the New York Attorney General’s office into a partisan weapon — one aimed not at justice, but at vengeance. Her entire tenure was defined by her fixation on Donald Trump, her willingness to contort the power of her office to achieve a political end, and her gleeful participation in what The New York Post aptly described as “the Democratic Party’s long campaign to criminalize opposition.”

Now, the “no one is above the law” standard finally applies to her. And it should.

James’s indictment, according to the Department of Justice, stems from her alleged falsification of financial information to secure a $109,600 mortgage on a second home in Virginia. Prosecutors say she falsely represented the property as her primary residence to obtain favorable loan terms, saving herself nearly $19,000 in costs. It’s the kind of small, self-serving deception that — if proven true — reveals not just corruption, but hypocrisy.

As The New York Post report pointed out, the same Letitia James who built her career on moral grandstanding and prosecutorial swagger is now the subject of the very sort of investigation she used to crow about.

When U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan declared that “no one is above the law,” it was impossible not to hear the echo of James’s own words — words she used repeatedly when pursuing Trump, his family, and his businesses. The statement now serves as a mirror, reflecting the collapse of her own moral authority.

James’s first instinct was to claim political persecution — an almost word-for-word echo of Trump’s own response to her actions. “This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system,” she said in a statement, accusing federal prosecutors of doing Trump’s bidding.

The symmetry is startling. For years, she mocked Trump for calling investigations into him “witch hunts.” Now she uses the same phraseology to defend herself. Perhaps it takes becoming the hunted to understand the abuses of the hunt.

Letitia James was never a neutral arbiter of justice — and she never pretended to be. Her entire campaign for attorney general was predicated on one promise: that she would take down Donald Trump. The New York Post, which chronicled her rise and her rhetoric in detail, has long warned that James blurred the line between law enforcement and political activism.

In 2018, when a community activist asked if she was ready to sue the then-president, James didn’t hesitate. “We’re gonna definitely sue him,” she said. “We’re gonna be a real pain in the ass.” She didn’t even hold office yet, hadn’t reviewed a single case file, and already she was pledging to use the machinery of justice to destroy a political adversary.

It wasn’t about the rule of law. It was about the rule of ideology.

And true to her word, she went after Trump with the fury of a political inquisitor. She filed lawsuit after lawsuit — not just against Trump the man, but against Trump the symbol. She sought to punish him, to humiliate him, and to brand him as a criminal in the public imagination.

When she finally secured a $355 million civil judgment against Trump earlier this year — one that The New York Post rightly called “a politically tainted overreach” — she celebrated it as though she had captured an enemy general. She declared that “justice was served.”

But when the appellate court threw out the verdict in August, citing prosecutorial excess and lack of merit, it wasn’t just a legal defeat — it was a moral one. It revealed that her pursuit was never truly about the law. It was about vengeance, optics, and power.

James’s obsession with Trump often overshadowed another pattern that has drawn scrutiny within New York’s business community — particularly among its white and Jewish entrepreneurs.

While she positioned herself as a champion of fairness, her office repeatedly targeted New York’s real estate and retail sectors, launching investigations and lawsuits against prominent Jewish-owned firms, many of them Orthodox.

A glaring example was her aggressive pursuit of B&H Photo and Video, a venerable Manhattan-based electronics retailer long respected in both the business and Orthodox Jewish communities. In 2021, James accused the company of tax violations in a case that The New York Post described as “a heavy-handed display of prosecutorial zeal.” Critics noted that the charges were built on technical disputes over sales tax reporting — the sort of issue usually resolved through administrative review, not public vilification.

The optics were unmistakable: James, the same attorney general who flaunted her vendetta against Trump, was also targeting one of New York’s most visible Jewish-owned businesses.

To many in the city’s real estate and business sectors, it looked like selective prosecution masquerading as justice. Her office’s pattern of investigations — overwhelmingly aimed at established firms with white or Jewish leadership — suggested a prosecutorial bias that was both ideological and opportunistic.

And now, those same business leaders who once whispered their fears about James’s politicized witch hunts are openly vindicated.

To understand Letitia James’s downfall is to understand the era that created her. She is not merely an ambitious attorney general gone rogue; she is the product of a political culture that rewards retribution and confuses prosecution with progress.

When the Democratic establishment sought to channel public outrage over the events of January 6th into something tangible, James became their enforcer. She embodied the party’s desire to “make Trump pay.” Her public persona — defiant, moralizing, unflinching — was tailor-made for the post-2020 climate of polarization and punishment.

Every lawsuit against Trump, every headline, every press conference served the same function: to keep his name, and hers, in the news. She became a symbol of moral resistance to the then former president, a heroine to her party’s progressive base, and a hammer for those who demanded accountability not through elections, but through indictments.

As The New York Post observed in one of its many critiques of her tenure, “Letitia James turned the attorney general’s office into a political weapon — a sword, not a shield.”

Now, the sword has swung back.

“No one is above the law” was Letitia James’s favorite phrase — her mantra in front of cameras, her justification in every filing, her creed in every speech.

“No one is above the law.”  She said it when she sued the NRA. She said it when she sued Trump. She said it when she announced sweeping investigations into New York City based landlords, real estate developers, and business owners.

But today, those words hang over her indictment like a curse.

If the allegations against her prove true — if she falsified loan documents to save a few thousand dollars — then she too has violated the very principle she once weaponized. She too must face accountability.

And this time, there will be no political halo, no adoring press conferences, no righteous indignation. Just the cold machinery of justice she once commanded.

There is a lesson here — one that transcends partisan lines. Power without humility corrupts. The justice system, when politicized, becomes indistinguishable from tyranny.

Letitia James’s indictment is not merely a personal scandal; it is a moral reckoning for a generation of officials who mistook activism for integrity and prosecution for virtue.

As The New York Post editorialized, “When prosecutors start choosing targets instead of crimes, democracy itself is at risk.”

For years, James believed that no one was above the law — except, perhaps, herself.

Now, the law has finally caught up.

And justice, long warped by politics, has a rare opportunity to prove it still applies to everyone — even those who once wielded it as a weapon.

Reuven Yitzchak Epstein is the son of Holocaust survivors and a lifelong Jewish activist