Three words in Letitia James' mortgage contract doom the fraud case against her

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25. they're not going to spend much time parsing whether she visited the home or stayed there

...and Fannie Mae doesn't actually make it clear what 'occupancy means.

Not to overlook that we're talking about a difference that would have amounted to $15 to $30 less in a monthly mortgage payment, extrapolated in the indictment over the entire life of the loan to make it look like James has profited by more than the paltry sum.

It's just as valid to say that the AG did in fact 'know better' than to scheme for $15 to $30 less in monthly mortage payments. Nothing in evidence shows that she intended to defraud the bank when she made the loan. At best she violated the terms, but it's really something to accuse someone of felony fraud for allowing a family member to stay in the home after she bought it.

Where's the proof that she knew what was going to happen after she made the loan and took possession of the home. The prosecutors are alleging some deep criminality in what's essentially giving them a place to live, and portraying that as a scheme to defraud the bank.

It's ridiculously absurd, the fraud appearing to be coming from the prosecutor because of the thinness of the evidence, the pettiness of the claims, and the nature of the appointment pointing to a forced prosecution motivated by politics.

You're barking up the wrong tree if you think I'm going to come anywhere near to saying that constitutes proof of a crime committed, much less something that a jury is going to believe is a valid felony charge.

And the political nature of this prosecution is intimately tied to it's prosecutability, because of the firing of prosecutors who refused to move to charge James based on everything this lady who has never prosecuted anything has available to her.

Observers who go down the route to carefully explain the law fail to show other cases where this set of facts has been charged or pressed to conviction in the past.

“In my experience, federal prosecutors would not have seriously pursued something this minor,” James Kainen, a professor with expertise in real estate and white collar crime at Fordham University School of Law, said in an email. “The indictment is disproportionate and inconsistent with established prosecutorial norms.”

Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at the George Washington University School of Law, told the Associated Press, “It is very uncommon for prosecutors to bring these sorts of claims absent a pattern of malicious activity or evidence that the individual has actually harmed the bank by not paying their mortgage or if it’s part of a much larger fraudulent scheme.”

Kainen, the Fordham law professor, told us, “The claimed mortgage fraud alleges a maximum savings to Ms. James” of about $18,933 “and no loss to the bank. … By comparison, prosecutors overlooked potential mortgage fraud cases involving applicants who lied about thousands of dollars in income and then defaulted on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt during the Great Recession.”

The James case “is hardly an investigation that would have resulted in an indictment for two federal felonies,” Kainen said. “Winning this case at trial requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. James had, in the words of the indictment, ‘no intention to make personal use of the property’ when she applied for the loan. If she changed her mind, thought she might use it, or even had any reason to spend time in Virginia, it would be difficult to convict her. Responsible prosecutors do not spend their time on minor cases that are hard to win.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/10/appraising-the-federal-indictment-of-letitia-james/