OPINION:
The Justice Department accused New York Attorney General Letitia James on Thursday of committing mortgage fraud. Democrats spent the weekend responding by blasting Donald Trump for exacting revenge on his political enemies.
It doesn’t help that the president has a habit of reveling in the misfortunes of those who once sought to bankrupt him, lock him up for life and erase his name from the 2024 ballot. Despite this, he has demonstrated appropriate legal restraint.
Federal prosecutors said Ms. James applied for a federally backed loan for a three-bedroom house in Norfolk, Virginia, stipulating that the dwelling would be used only as a vacation home, not a rental property. Her tax returns apparently declared the location a rental with “zero personal use days.”
By fibbing on the form, this devoted public servant stood to save $18,933 by the Justice Department’s reckoning. That’s small potatoes, and Ms. James will have a sympathetic audience for her side of the story. Any punishment imposed by the Democratic-appointed judge would be mild.
It could have been much worse for her. As Bill Pulte, director of federal housing finance, told Fox News host Charlie Hurt in August, he believes Ms. James’ Norfolk scheme fits a broader pattern of financial deceit.
“In 1983, she said that her father is her husband to get a mortgage. Then, in the 2000s, she buys a home, which is listed under the certificate of occupancy in New York as having five units. You can only really get a Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or other related mortgages if you have four or less units,” Mr. Pulte said.
The Norfolk loan case is the most straightforward because the documents Ms. James signed speak for themselves. Novel interpretations of statutes or the bending of procedural rules won’t be needed to make a persuasive argument.
The same can’t be said for the accusations Ms. James leveled against Mr. Trump. Her complaint revolved around the testimony of admitted perjurer Michael Cohen, which she spun into a $454 million judgment against the Republican candidate for president in the middle of the 2024 campaign.
This “crime” was entirely in the eye of the beholder. For instance, Mr. Trump claimed his Mar-a-Lago estate would sell for far more than $18 million, the low end of what Judge Arthur F. Engoron asserted the massive, profit-generating seaside resort in Florida was worth.
Mr. Trump did puff up the value of his holdings, but such estimates are subjective. A judicial officer has no business inserting himself into voluntary transactions among sophisticated parties. Here, the banks were thrilled to have completed a profitable deal with New York’s most famous entrepreneur.
A fair jury would have been baffled by the mental gymnastics required to twist a positive outcome for everyone involved into wrongdoing, but it never went to a jury. Judge Engoron, a registered Democrat, contorted a broadly worded anti-fraud law to impose the wildly disproportionate penalty.
In August, New York’s intermediate court overturned Judge Engoron’s assessment. Even a panel of five Manhattan-based judges, not exactly a meeting of the Federalist Society, had to concede this was a blatant violation of the Eighth Amendment protection against excessive fines.
Democrats did everything they could to destroy Mr. Trump politically and personally. By contrast, if Ms. James is found to have lied to the government, she won’t struggle to repay her ill-gotten gains.
That’s the difference between justice and retaliation.
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