The Lawyer Trump Fired In 2017 Now Runs The Operation Targeting Him

Letitia James spent four years and millions of tax dollars trying to convict Donald Trump of something.

Now a prosecutor inside her own office says that was never about the law.

The person running that hunt for Trump was fired by his own administration years earlier.

Whistleblower Email Names Trump Truth Social And A Merger As Targets

Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld sent the email to more than 2,000 colleagues on Friday.

He said his supervisor ordered him to find and pursue crimes committed by people and organizations "affiliated with Donald Trump."

No specific crime came with that order.

The named targets included Trump himself, his Truth Social platform, and a Hewlett-Packard merger James's office had already opposed.

Wiesenfeld says the directive came straight from Investor Protection Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe.

The email disappeared from the office server within hours.

James's general counsel, Kumiki Gibson, told staff internally that this was strictly an internal matter and nobody had anything to fear.

A separate office spokesperson dismissed it as a personnel matter and said the office treats every New Yorker the same, regardless of politics.

Wiesenfeld got placed on paid leave for saying otherwise.

The Bureau Chief Trump Fired In 2017 And Biden Later Paid $795,000

Shamiso Maswoswe did not walk into this fight as a stranger to Trump world.

Trump's own Justice Department fired her from the Public Integrity Section in December 2017.

She sued, alleging race, pregnancy, and caregiving discrimination, and the Biden DOJ cut her a $795,000 settlement in 2023 without admitting any wrongdoing.

She joined James's office in February 2022 and now runs the bureau accused of hunting Trump with no crime in hand.

A woman who won a payday off Trump's first administration is now allegedly deciding which of his allies get investigated in his second.

Nobody at that office wanted voters connecting those dots.

Why This Fits A Pattern James Has Run Since 2022

James ran for attorney general on one unofficial promise: nail Trump for something, anything, crime unspecified.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley has tracked that pattern for years.

He points to a striking gap in the record: researchers reportedly could not find a single earlier case of that same fraud statute being used against a company that broke no other law, never went broke, and never left anyone out real money.

Translate that into plain English.

James picked the man first and sent her lawyers looking for a law to fit him afterward.

Wiesenfeld's message to his colleagues carried that same accusation home.

His plea, in his own words, was simple: stop acting as the attorney general's personal legal muscle against her political enemies.

Democrats spent years accusing Trump appointees of weaponizing federal law enforcement against political opponents.

Meanwhile James's own bureau chief was allegedly running that exact playbook out of Albany, and nobody outside her own staff was watching.

The White House did not bother softening its response.

Spokesperson Lauren Bis called the leaked email "proof of the weaponization of the justice system," and accused James of running lawfare against Trump and his allies.

She's not the only one making that case.

James's own history makes the double standard worse.

Last year, DOJ weaponization czar Ed Martin opened a real investigation into James's own mortgage paperwork on properties in Brooklyn and Virginia.

That probe was built on actual document discrepancies, not a name pulled out of a hat.

James called it political revenge and fought it in court.

She screamed foul over a probe built on real paperwork, yet needed no paperwork at all to send her own staff after Trump.

James built a career selling New Yorkers a trophy kill.

This week, one of her own prosecutors handed them the receipt.

Sources:

• Ashley J. DiMella, "Deleted email details alleged Trump-targeting push inside Letitia James' office: 'Find and pursue crimes,'" Fox News, September 2, 2026.
• Jonathan Turley, "Tish's Personal Attorneys Targeting Her Political Enemies: Former Prosecutor Lashes Out at Letitia James," JonathanTurley.org, September 1, 2026.
• "Whistleblower In Letitia James' Office Says He Was Ordered To 'Target Trump,'" The Federalist, September 1, 2026.
• "NY Prosecutor Blows Whistle on Letitia James' Office: We Were Ordered to Target Trump," Legal Insurrection, September 1, 2026.
• "Trump weaponization czar urged New York Attorney General James to resign over mortgage probe," Associated Press, August 19, 2025.