Trump slammed for breaking rules as he sics 'wholly unqualified' prosecutors on enemy

President Donald Trump is exacting "payback" on New York Attorney General Letitia James for winning a massive civil fraud judgment against him last year, wrote MSNBC legal analyst Anthony Coley on Tuesday — by tapping a pair of highly partisan and unfit prosecutors to dig into politically charged, baseless controversies.

It's part of a broader pattern of spurious legal attacks on Trump's political enemies that also involves Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).

"NBC News reported Friday that Attorney General Pam Bondi has made MAGA activist Ed Martin a 'special attorney' to probe mortgage fraud allegations against James made by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William J. Pulte, a Trump nominee who was sworn in in March," wrote Coley.

But the administration isn't stopping there: "The office of John Sarcone III, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York, sent James’s office two subpoenas last week that seek to discover if she violated the rights of Trump and his businesses, as well as the rights of the National Rifle Association."

Not only are these cases nonsense, wrote Coley, but Martin and Sarcone are "wholly unqualified for their roles" in the first place.

"Sarcone, who hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate, wrongly said a panel of federal judges had voted to extend his interim appointment as a U.S. attorney. In fact, that panel refused to extend his appointment, and the DOJ got around that rejection with a maneuver that appears to have never been used for the appointment of a U.S. Attorney," wrote Coley.

Meanwhile, Martin's brief stint as acting D.C. federal prosecutor, firing off random legal threats to Trump critics, was such a disaster "he couldn’t secure enough Republican senators to support his nomination."

As for the mortgage fraud allegations, which assert James falsely claimed multiple properties as a primary residence, her attorney Abbe Lowell submitted a response to Bondi earlier this year reading in part, “Director Pulte cherry-picked an August 17, 2023 power of attorney that mistakenly stated the property to be Ms. James’ principal residence and at the same time absolutely ignored her very clear and all caps statement two weeks earlier to the mortgage loan broker that “[t]his property WILL NOT be my primary residence.”

Notably, Coley continued, DOJ officials have already violated department guidelines by even disclosing these investigations exist in the first place.

All of this, he concluded, appears to be a rerun of the final days of Trump's first term, when the DOJ leaked information on criminal probes into COVID nursing home deaths in blue states, with internal communications describing it as "our last play on them before the election."

"Put plainly, DOJ officials were weaponizing the department’s vast powers to attack the president’s political opponents for partisan purposes. That’s exactly what Justice Department appointees appear to be doing now."