By Steve Neavling
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has appointed Ed Martin, a conservative activist and former interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., to investigate mortgage fraud allegations against Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James, according to two administration officials, NBC News reports.
A grand jury in Maryland will handle the case involving Schiff, while one in the Eastern District of Virginia will investigate James, officials said. Martin met Friday with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, who referred both Democrats to the Justice Department earlier this year.
Trump has repeatedly called for their prosecution. Both Schiff and James deny wrongdoing.
Preet Bharara, Schiff’s attorney, said the allegations are “transparently false, stale, and long debunked.” Schiff previously called Trump’s push for charges “the kind of stuff you see tinpot dictators do. It is designed to intimidate his political opponents and somehow try to silence them.”
The Justice Department is also examining whether James’ office violated Trump’s legal rights in its civil fraud case against him and his businesses, which resulted in a judgment of more than $500 million with interest. That probe is also looking into her lawsuit against the National Rifle Association.
“Any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American. We stand strongly behind our successful litigation against the Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association,” a spokesperson for James said.
Her attorney, Abbe Lowell, called the probe “the most blatant and desperate example of this administration carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign,” adding that “weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law.”
Bharara criticized Martin’s appointment, calling him “the most brazenly partisan and politically compromised person possible for the task” and saying any investigation he led “would be the very definition of weaponization of the justice process.”
