"Letitia James is a corrupt person. I feel bad for whoever she is looking at because they won't get a fair shake."
On September 16, 2026, a woman identified as Jane Doe sued Cornell University and others in New York County Supreme Court, alleging she was drugged and raped by five members of the Chi Phi fraternity on October 19-20, 2024. In November 2024 the Tompkins County District Attorney had declined to prosecute anyone, without ever speaking to her, relying in part on a summary of her statement to the Cornell University Police Department that omitted her assertion that she had been sexually assaulted. On Wednesday, September 30, Governor Kathy Hochul called on Cornell to commission an independent outside investigation, and the university agreed. On the night of Thursday, October 1, she signed Executive Order No. 64, invoking subdivision 2 of section 63 of the New York Executive Law to require the Attorney General, as Special Prosecutor, to "investigate the conduct of, and, if warranted, present evidence to a grand jury against and prosecute offenses arising out of" the allegations — displacing the District Attorney's jurisdiction. Her written statement that day said the new information "has undercut my faith, and the public's faith, in the District Attorney's ability to effectively investigate and prosecute the case at this time," and that the appointment "will ensure that the matter is fully and thoroughly investigated without conflict or bias." At a press conference with James she said the complainant "sat for hours and told them exactly what happened to her" and "could not have been clearer that she was 100% confident that she had been raped. Yet, shockingly, those words never made it into the account that the Cornell police sent to prosecutors." Cornell said it "supports Governor Hochul's decision." James gave the statement above and said at the press conference: "I stand ready to lead a process guided by the facts and the law... We will review the facts, gather evidence, interview witnesses, and, if warranted, pursue prosecutions." On Friday, October 2, on the South Lawn before leaving for Alabama, Trump gave the answer above. The prior record is a matter of docket. On October 9, 2025, Lindsey Halligan — a former White House aide and Trump lawyer with no prior prosecutorial experience, appointed Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia two weeks earlier — personally and alone presented a grand jury with a two-count indictment of James for bank fraud and making a false statement to a financial institution over a Norfolk mortgage, in United States v. James, No. 2:25-cr-00122. Her signature was the only one on it. James moved to dismiss on the ground that Halligan's appointment was unlawful under 28 U.S.C. 546 and the Appointments Clause, and separately argued the prosecution was politically motivated, citing Trump's own public statements urging charges after the previous U.S. Attorney, Erik Siebert, declined to bring them. The court agreed on the appointment question — holding that once the Attorney General's 120-day interim authority lapsed, only the district court could fill the vacancy — and dismissed the indictment without prejudice in November 2025. The Department then went back to grand juries in Virginia twice, and twice they returned no true bill, the second on December 11, 2025. The Department — on a filing bearing the names of Halligan, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert McBride and Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Keller — moved the next day to impound and seal the foreperson's notice of the no true bill. U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter refused, noting that ABC News had published the result at 4:06 p.m. on December 11, thirty-three minutes before the grand jury handed it up in open court, and calling the effort "essentially futile." The government appealed the dismissal to the Fourth Circuit on December 19, 2025, and the appeal was consolidated with United States v. Comey on January 12, 2026; briefing was under way as of the last public docket entry reviewed for this entry, and no appellate ruling on the merits has issued.
Filed it as the feud. "Trump calls Letitia James corrupt" ran as a reaction story appended to the Cornell appointment, with a sentence of background noting the two have "a long-running feud" and that she once sued him. The appointment itself was covered seriously and well — the executive order, the omitted sentence in the police summary, the DA who never interviewed the complainant, Cornell's acquiescence. The two halves never met. What is missing is that the specific charge the President leveled is that this prosecutor cannot be fair to the people she investigates, and the only extended public test of that proposition ran the other direction: his own Justice Department sought to indict her, in a district 500 miles from her home, through a prosecutor a federal court found unlawfully appointed, and two separate grand juries of ordinary citizens declined to charge her. Not one outlet put the phrase "won't get a fair shake" next to a docket in which the fairness question was litigated and the government lost it twice. The second omission is the prior-statement problem. James's motion to dismiss cited Trump's own public demands for her prosecution as evidence of vindictive prosecution; that argument is live on appeal in the Fourth Circuit. He has now made another public statement about her prosecutorial fitness while that appeal is pending. Nobody asked his counsel, or the Department, whether the President commenting on a pending adversary is a problem for the Department's own filings. The third is the smallest and the most telling: the Department's attempt to seal its failure, which a magistrate judge described as futile because the press already had it. That order is public, it names the Deputy Attorney General, and it has appeared in this coverage exactly nowhere.
This file has five entries on the Department as an instrument. Entry #39: the President sent a named reporter to the FCC while that agency was defending a retaliation claim. Entry #44: the FCC told a judge the chilling effect was self-inflicted. Entry #50: three government wins in twelve days, each because of which court was hearing it. Entry #59: a written claim of "tremendous CRIMINAL" power over a named company, and an Attorney General who disclaimed only the regulatory half. Entry #61: an Attorney General asked whether attacking the Court undermines its independence. This entry is the mirror image and it is why it belongs in the file. Every previous entry recorded federal power being pointed at someone. Here federal power was pointed and missed — dismissed for an unlawful appointment, refused twice by grand juries, and caught trying to seal the refusal — and the target then received state prosecutorial authority over an entirely unrelated matter from a different sovereign. The President's response was not to contest the Cornell appointment on any ground connected to it. It was to tell the country, on camera, that anyone she looks at will not be treated fairly. There is no charge pending against Letitia James. There is no finding that she has ever prosecuted anyone unfairly. There is a complainant in Tompkins County whose statement was shortened before it reached a prosecutor who then never called her, and the first thing the President of the United States said about the lawyer now assigned to that case is that her targets are owed sympathy.