Sekulow Weekend

Will Haynes: Welcome to Sekulow. Will Haynes here, and I want to wish all of you a very happy Labor Day weekend. It is the official end of summer for so many. Many of you are already back to school, and many more of you are looking ahead to a new school year as well. But we are going to talk right now about what's been happening in the New York Attorney General's office. We mentioned in previous broadcasts what has been going on with this whistleblower that came forward and said that the boss at the Investor Protection Bureau in the New York Attorney General's office was pushing attorneys and prosecutors to go after President Trump and go after allies of President Trump. It is very much a case of do as I say, not as I do when it comes to this Attorney General because she has been one of those people saying, "President Trump is making an enemies list, going after me for just following the law." Meanwhile, we know that this has been the MO from the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, who ran on getting President Trump, on going after him back in 2018. We know that there was that huge civil case that she brought against him that had to do with her saying that he overvalued properties like Mar-a-Lago, and therefore that was fraudulent because banks gave him loans. This was even though the banks testified that they weren't defrauded and he paid back these loans, so there was no issue there. Meanwhile, once again, she is the one where questions arose from getting favorable mortgage rates for properties in Norfolk, Virginia, and Brooklyn, New York. All that to say, it always seems to be do as I say, not as I do. The ACLJ got directly involved in this by sending a state FOIL request. You hear about FOIA requests, which is the Freedom of Information Act for the federal government. In New York, it's a FOIL, the Freedom of Information Law. We got it within 24 hours of this whistleblower news. We sent a FOIL request to the New York Attorney General's office to get information because of what happened. A whistleblower said, "Look, this is what they're doing. They're going after people, not crimes. This isn't how it should work. Don't be Letitia James' personal attorney." All of a sudden, that email that went to 2,000 people started disappearing from people's inboxes. Even if they had read it, it was gone. We want to know what happened. This harkens back to what we saw with the IRS scandal with Lois Lerner where emails just disappeared. Or maybe Hillary Clinton, where emails disappeared. A private server in the bathroom disappears. BleachBit became a word and a software that everyone knew because of missing emails. It always seems to be the emails, but we're going to get to the bottom of this because we knew it was happening, but now people are coming forward and saying it is happening. That's not the way the legal system in this country should work. We're going to cover that and so much more today on Sekulow. We hope everyone is having a relaxing and wonderful Labor Day weekend. It's also the kickoff of college football. It's a great time of year as we head into the fall. But there's a lot of work going on because, as we always mention, back to school means there are new administrators and new teachers that are going to try and violate the rights of their students. The ACLJ is there. It means a midterm election is coming up. The ACLJ will be here to navigate the issues that are front and center, as well as things like this, where Letitia James' office is getting a state FOIL request as we try to get to the bottom of what happened to that email. Why did it disappear? They said it was a personnel issue. It sounds like it. Once again, all of these things are possible because you support the ACLJ. Many of you did in the month of August, which was a wonderful time to see so many people standing with the ACLJ, and we thank you for that. If you need help, the ACLJ is also here for you. Go to aclj.org/help and an attorney will be in touch with you if you feel like your constitutional rights are being violated. We'll be back with more on Sekulow.
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Will Haynes: Welcome back to Sekulow. We're breaking this down for you as an Assistant Attorney General in the New York Attorney General's office, Letitia James, you've heard of her on this broadcast for years. She ran on going after President Trump and successfully got a verdict in New York court about a civil case where she tried to say that he defrauded banks by overvaluing things on paper. Meanwhile, she did that exact same thing in order to get more favorable mortgage rates when it comes to properties in Norfolk, Virginia, and Brooklyn, New York, but there was nothing to see there. We know that it has been her goal publicly to get the President. To some degree, you still think it is political rhetoric, that there's no one inside her AG's office actually saying it. You can create that culture without having to actually give those directives.
Jordan Sekulow: Well, what we're seeing according to this Assistant Attorney General, Daniel Weisenfeld, is that he sent an agency-wide email on Friday. He said, "Guess what? Letitia James and my boss here in the Investor Protection Bureau aren't focusing on the right things. They're just saying get Trump and his allies. They're making political enemies lists and asking for them to find crimes to fit the people." When you look at this, you see they said, "We want you to focus your time here." He laid it out. He said to go after Trump himself, go after Truth Social, and go after Hewlett Packard because the Trump DOJ approved that merger. We want to look at that too. They had no credible reason. They just got a list of the people or companies that have been associated with President Trump. You've got the social media company, a tech company, and President Trump himself, and the list went on. There wasn't any reason given. Usually, when you start these investigations, it's because of a reason. Someone like a whistleblower comes to you from inside a company, or you're doing the normal kind of due diligence, and maybe a different division within the New York government says, "We believe there's been a tax issue." The tax division could bring it to the Attorney General's office. That would be normal courses: investigators, the police, security services that are looking at financial transactions, and all of that. What we see here is an Assistant AG saying they didn't get any of that information. They had nothing to start with. It wasn't like, "Because Donald Trump did X, Y, and Z, we would like you to look at A, B, and C." It was, "Let's see if you can find anything illegal that we could sue Donald Trump over." You mentioned the one case they were able to bring over property, which is on hold now as we speak because the President is the President. Those lawsuits have to all stall out while he's President of the United States. But this again shows that this is continuing because this is an email that went out on Friday. Not Friday three years ago, but Friday just last week, just a handful of days ago. This Assistant AG in New York likely is probably not a huge Trump supporter, though maybe they are. But the system inside New York in the Attorney General's office, especially under Letitia James and these appointees to get to that level, would be people that would be vetted, people that would be brought in because they share the same ideas. It's not supposed to be about politics in the Attorney General's office, but they run as politicians, so usually they would share the same political ideas as well. That being said, that should all be able to be true and you don't make a political enemies list to prosecute. President Trump and this DOJ have gotten a lot of flak for investigating former officials who it appeared targeted the Trump administration unlawfully. They're being targeted with a saying, "Oh, that is some kind of a list of those we just want to get. That's just our political opponent that we want to take down." No, it was people that they believe were engaged in wrongdoing. They made the FBI and DOJ look bad. They've really tarnished the reputation of the Department of Justice, the IRS, and others. We've seen that happen. You look at the Jim Comeys. You look at what they did. You look at former CIA directors and National Security and decide: marching into the White House without any approval to sit down and talk to staff that had been there for 48 hours because you knew they weren't the typical Washington insiders that would have the stonewalls in place for your FBI agents to be stopped at the door. Jim Comey did that. That's worthy of an investigation. He admitted to doing it. So why not be able to investigate? If you tweet out and search out what it means to get rid of somebody, "8647," you're looking at whether or not I should send that. You can investigate that when you're talking about the President of the United States and that means removing them. That means getting rid of them. A lot of other people would read that as much more of a threat or a call to action as a threat. Those are not investigating political opponents just because. You're investigating them for a reason. Here, I think this Assistant Attorney General's issue was probably not that it was Donald Trump or Hewlett Packard. It was that they were just being told by their higher-ups to go after these people, and that's it. They didn't have a briefing paper of research. They didn't have another agency that gave them hundreds of pages from the FBI that said, "This is what we found," or the New York Bureau of Investigation, the New York tax authority, or anything like that to say that we feel like there's been a violation of law for these individuals that were listed or corporations that were listed. That would have probably been very different. This is like the worst of the worst when you have an Assistant AG say they just gave us political targets to go after. We assumed they were politically targeting people, but not this explicit. The bosses were giving the marching orders: go see if you can find something we can bring a lawsuit against Donald Trump personally, against his company, or against any kind of businesses that did work with that Trump administration.
Will Haynes: Here's what's wild about this as well. Once again, he says in this email, "I ask that you not serve as Tish's personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies. Instead, I hope you choose to prosecute crimes and find the individuals accountable rather than targeting individuals and then finding crimes." That harkens back to Joseph Stalin's chief of his secret police who once famously said, "Show me the man, I'll show you the crime." He's saying don't be like Joseph Stalin's regime here, which is wild. But then you get further down into this. Why is he doing this? When you look at state attorneys general's offices, you think about the 2,000 people that received this email. There are going to be people, even if it's run by someone who won the office that you disagree with politically, someone like Letitia James, there are going to be people that believe in the rule of law in these offices. We have represented whistleblowers here at the ACLJ. We know what they put them through. How they try to completely starve them out, literally, by cutting off their pay and any sort of being able to get income for their family if they are a whistleblower. Here, Letitia James' office said he's on leave with pay. But he opened the email with this, and it's going to have to be edited, but he said the best part of having a lot of money is being able to tell the truth without fear of consequences, so here we go. He was projecting that there are a lot of other people that believe this, that see the wrong that's happening in this office. He's saying, "I'm financially secure enough, I'm not concerned about losing my job, so I'm going to speak truth now." He's only been Assistant Attorney General here for two years. Part of what he was concerned about is that Letitia James' office was, quote, "using significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies while taking no action against rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues." These are two issues here at the ACLJ we talk about almost every single day, definitely every week. One is crime, antisemitic crime that's going on that they're not focusing on, and he says that. Also, there is the fraud and the use of taxpayer money in charities that are taking grants for things like homeless shelters that are defrauding the taxpayer. They're not spending the time going after these two items because they're too busy going after convenient public enemies. That's why we are filing a state FOIL request. That's the Freedom of Information Law in New York to get to the bottom of this because we know there were records generated. They just tried to delete them.
Jordan Sekulow: That's right. We've got the email. So people have it, even though they deleted it from the servers. We have the names. A lot of times you don't get the names. We already have the names, so we've got a head start here in this Freedom of Information request to New York. It's a bigger head start than we usually get. We have the specific targets. We have the fact that there was no reasoning. We know who told the attorney to do this. More names keep coming out as we speak on the show today. Give us a call at 1-800-684-3110 and let us know what you think. It's starting to unravel at an interesting time. Folkes, once again, we want to thank you for your support in the month of August. You made everything we do possible, and so we want to say thank you for that.
Guest (Male): For decades now, the ACLJ has been on the front lines, protecting your freedoms, defending your rights in court, in Congress, and in the public arena. The American Center for Law and Justice is on your side. If you're already a member, thank you. If you're not, well, this is the perfect time to stand with us at aclj.org where you can learn more about our life-changing work. Become a member today at aclj.org.
Will Haynes: Welcome back to Sekulow. We're breaking this down for you as this whistleblower from the New York Attorney General's office came forward and alleged that the office is focused not on things that they should be, such as homeless shelter fraud where people are abusing the system, fraudulently taking either taxpayer dollars or public donations and not fulfilling the services. He calls that a rampant issue. He also mentioned antisemitic crime in and around synagogues. Those things are being ignored while the Attorney General of New York and her deputies are targeting convenient public enemies at significant public taxpayer expense.
Jordan Sekulow: We're finding more as we go. There is a new interesting article the New York Post just dropped as we're going along; this drip, drip, drip is happening. The Investor Protection Bureau Chief, who was the boss of this Assistant Attorney General, has a history of not liking Trump as well. She was at the DOJ before becoming this guy's boss and the head of the Investor Protection Bureau, which is why they would have overseen any business transactions like the HP transaction that he listed in the email. He said we need to go after HP just because they didn't like the fact that the merger or the proposed merger and that the Trump administration was okay with that. This included President Trump personally in a financial capacity and others associated with President Trump. She was actually at the DOJ. In 2021 was when she filed the complaint, but in 2017, just a year after President Trump took office, she was let go from the DOJ. She filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination that was settled under the Biden administration's DOJ. As the court case went, we have no idea how the court case was going for her or whether or not it was likely she was going to be successful. The Biden administration settled it for nearly $800,000, $795,000 to be exact. She picked up this job in Letitia James' Attorney General's office in New York at the same time. She goes right from the DOJ with a partisan and a personal ongoing battle with the President and the President's administration. So you see why it's bigger than just Trump and why that list of people that he put out wasn't just going after President Trump. It was like anyone associated with him and any companies associated with him that might have benefited because of a policy decision from the President. Then she gets picked up by this office, and that's the attorney, the head of that Investor Protection Bureau, who is the director who told this Assistant AG to go after Trump. She kept this ongoing and you've got to start putting all these pieces together. This is someone who had a personal and likely political vendetta against the President, and she got one of those solved during the Biden administration with a settlement because she didn't have to fight out the case. They just paid her to settle it. We have no idea if she would have won that case or what she alleged. She didn't bring it until it was a different Attorney General. She was let go in December of 2017 while that was in the first full year of President Trump's term. She did not file it until the first year of Biden's term. The case wasn't filed until 2021 and then it was settled in 2023. It was six years after she was let go when it was settled, but it was four years after she was let go before she even brought the case. There was a change of administration. You see, we talk about lawfare. Lawfare is not quick because the legal system acts slowly and you can wait years sometimes. You have different statutes of limitation to bring different allegations, charges, and complaints as she did. She waited. She said, "I'm not going to do this against the DOJ I just got fired from, I'm going to wait until maybe there's a friendly DOJ and they'll just settle it." They're not going to want to fight her over these issues that she is alleging, even if she is incorrect. $800,000 is a lot of individual money, but it's nothing when it comes to the Department of Justice budget, especially to settle something like this. Then she can go get a job with her friend Letitia James, being the head of the Investor Protection Bureau. That is a huge part of the New York Attorney General's office because of where it's located: in the financial district in New York City, where most of the biggest financial transactions are going through in the world. I'm going to let some people in on a little inside baseball here about how the ACLJ works, as so many of you supported this work in August and we're so thankful for you standing with us. Yesterday afternoon, this article comes out from a small local newspaper in the capital region of New York.
Will Haynes: I saw it. The first thing I thought was that we've got a lead for the show tomorrow. The second thing I did was send it immediately to Jordan and Jay. I said, "Look at this, very interesting," knowing they would know exactly what to do. What is the first thing you and your dad both immediately said? "We need to get a state version of the FOIA," which in this case is called FOIL, Freedom of Information Law in New York. There are clearly records there because there was an email on a government server that was then deleted. They get our attorneys, give them their marching orders immediately, and start saying, "Get this. We've got to get it out fast."
Jordan Sekulow: We already know they're taking steps to get things deleted off their server. They are taking things off the servers, so what we have now is probably what we will have. It's whatever that attorney who got put on leave took with him that was printed or saved somewhere else, because they went into the server and removed this email. It went to every single employee of the New York State Attorney General's office. They tried to reply all as they were removing the email and say it was an internal matter that had to do with an employee, and that they were going to investigate it that way. Of course, they try to say no one should be worried or concerned. I guess maybe people were worried or concerned that they were violating the law based on what he was saying or potentially violating legal ethics, which could get you disbarred and get you in serious trouble. There could be an investigation by the big DOJ into the New York Attorney General's office about whether they are unlawfully and politically targeting their political enemies.
Will Haynes: When you have someone like this, and this is not an unnamed whistleblower, it's not someone who came and said, "I'm just going to come and I want to have that protection of immunity, I don't want people to know my name." This person is named. They knew they'd be named. They knew they'd be retaliated against. They're still being paid, which limits some of their ability to speak, as they put that at risk if they do talk. When you read this, you realize this is someone who was pushed and pushed and felt like they were being told to find crimes for people because their bosses didn't like their politics. They said they were given no reason and weren't provided a report. It wasn't like we just said we're going to talk about Letitia James today because we feel like talking about her. We're doing it because there's a report. A whistleblower, who is pretty high up, put out an email to the entire New York AG's office accusing the AG and her top deputies of politically targeting and using lawfare against their political enemies. If you have questions about this, call us at 1-800-684-3110. We get results, and we've actually seen a lot more results in this era of going directly to the states because that's where a lot of these issues are happening at this point. We've got a lot more ahead. We're going to keep breaking this down. We have Jeff Ballabon joining us in segment five as well. Call us at 1-800-684-3110 to talk to us on air.