Donald Trump’s destructive onslaught against the fair administration of justice and his politicization of prosecutorial power continues. That is what dictators do, which is one of the reasons Trump so admires them.
Trump has now fired Erik Siebert as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for refusing to gin up phony mortgage fraud charges against New York Attorney General Tish James, a top target of Trump. Good for Siebert and bad for the United States.
James, who won a major civil fraud case against Trump for his false valuations of his real estate holdings, has been on the president’s enemy’s list since he returned to the White House.
A Trump hatchet man, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, made a ludicrous criminal referral of James to the Department of Justice that she committed mortgage fraud in assisting her niece in a 2023 financing of a home in Norfolk, Va.
Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage knows that a stack of papers must be signed at the closing. One of the papers hadn’t been changed from the default standard form that the property would be the primary home of James, although every other document in the transaction correctly indicated that the property would not be her primary home.
James didn’t notice or intend to present the form claiming it was to be her primary home (an impossibility as she was New York AG at the time) and the lending bank didn’t notice the form and didn’t reduce the mortgage rate.
The outlier form, a limited power of attorney, was a scrivener’s error. It was clear to all that the Norfolk property was not for James, but for her niece. There is no mortgage fraud. There is no crime. There is no nothing.
But under Pulte’s theory, there was a crime. The nutty same idea is in the head of Ed Martin, another crank who was Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia until even Republican senators balked. Martin is now instead the U.S. pardon attorney, the special attorney for mortgage fraud, the associate deputy attorney general and director of the DOJ’s weaponization task force.
Martin has said that James should resign due to the mortgage fraud and last month he posed for photos outside James’ Brooklyn brownstone, wearing a trench coat looking like Inspector Clouseau. We mean no insult to Peter Sellers’ legendary Parisian investigator, who has more brains and more integrity than Martin. Martin is the one who should resign.
But instead Trump is listening to Pulte and Martin, who wanted Siebert ousted for failure to indict James. Siebert presented the evidence to a grand jury, but there was no crime.
Note that Siebert, a career prosecutor, was appointed interim U.S. attorney by Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi in January. On May 6, Trump nominated Siebert for the post. And then on May 9, the 11 federal judges in the area unanimously appointed Siebert permanently, even before the Senate had had a chance to act.
But Martin and Pulte wanted Siebert out and Trump agreed. Siebert resigned on Friday, but then Trump then claimed that he fired Siebert before he resigned.
When Trump wanted legitimate federal criminal charges dropped against Mayor Adams, the professional career prosecutor appointed by Trump objected and was fired. When Trump wanted illegitimate federal criminal charges filed against Tish James, the professional career prosecutor appointed by Trump objected and was fired.
The president is not a king and he should not be the one deciding who is charged with crimes and who is not. Erik Siebert was right to resist Trump’s command. Hopefully, Siebert’s successors will also.
