{"id":135122,"date":"2025-10-14T14:04:05","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T22:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/10\/14\/the-tish-james-indictment-looks-like-country-fried-bs\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T14:04:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T22:04:05","slug":"the-tish-james-indictment-looks-like-country-fried-bs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/10\/14\/the-tish-james-indictment-looks-like-country-fried-bs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tish James Indictment Looks Like Country-Fried BS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Lindsey Halligan, the acting\/interim\/special\/imaginary US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted<\/a> New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, fulfilling a long-held goal of her client, Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

James is charged with two felonies relating to the purchase of an investment property in Norfolk, Virginia: one count of bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1344<\/a>, and one count of making a false statement on a mortgage application in violation of 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1014<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As with the recent indictment of James Comey, another Trump nemesis, the James indictment was so weak that regular prosecutors \u2014 i.e., ones who have actually tried criminal cases \u2014 refused to touch it<\/a>. And, as in Comey\u2019s case, Halligan was the only lawyer willing to sign off on it. So if conservative commentators<\/a> and Sam Alito(!)<\/a> are right, and her appointment was unlawful<\/a>, the case may get dismissed long before trial.<\/p>\n

Meet Virginia<\/h2>\n

Prior to this indictment, it was presumed that Halligan would indict James with respect to a different Virginia property. Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has been spelunking through financial records of Trump\u2019s enemies, and he sent a criminal referral<\/a> to Attorney General James regarding a house in Norfolk. But apparently Halligan punted on The Case of the Errant Power of Attorney<\/em>, an extraneous document which erroneously described the property as a personal residence, when every other piece of the loan application correctly described it as a rental. Worst Nancy Drew mystery ever!<\/p>\n

Instead she charged James with lying on a mortgage application for a different house in Norfolk, which James purchased in August of 2020 for $137,000. She received a loan for 80 percent of the purchase price from Old Virginia Mortgage (now known as OVM Financial), which she appears to have paid off in 2024.<\/p>\n

According to the indictment, James falsely claimed that she planned to use the house as a second home in order to lower her interest rate from 3.815 to 3.0 percent, saving herself $17,837 over the four-year life of the loan. In a conclusory fashion, but without providing any evidence, it states that James \u201cknowingly\u201d made false statements on the loan document. This has a certain irony, since James prosecuted Trump for falsely inflating his net worth on mortgage applications, something he claimed was a victimless crime so long as the lender was paid in full. The government also claims that the reduced rate netted James just over an extra $1,000 in the seller\u2019s credit at settlement.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the indictment yaddayaddayaddas<\/em> over several elements of the supposed crime, which strongly suggests that it was done on purpose because filling in the blanks would fatally undermine the prosecution.<\/p>\n

The Low Rider<\/h2>\n

Paragraph 6 of the indictment alleges that:<\/p>\n

\n

The loan was originated by OVM Financial under a signed Second Home Rider, which required James, as the sole borrower, to occupy and use the property as her secondary residence and prohibited its use as a timesharing or other shared ownership agreement or agreement that requires her to rent the property or give any person any control over the occupancy or use of the property.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That language roughly mirrors Fannie Mae Form 3890<\/a>, which James almost certainly signed as part of her mortgage application. It says:<\/p>\n

\n

6. Occupancy. Borrower must occupy and use the Property as Borrower\u2019s second home. Borrower will maintain exclusive control over the occupancy of the Property, including short-term rentals, and will not subject the Property to any timesharing or other shared ownership arrangement or to any rental pool or agreement that requires Borrower either to rent the Property or give a management firm or any other person or entity any control over the occupancy or use of the Property. Borrower will keep the Property available primarily as a residence for Borrower\u2019s personal use and enjoyment for at least one year after the date of this Security Instrument, unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing, which consent will not be unreasonably withheld, or unless extenuating circumstances exist that are beyond Borrower\u2019s control.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Plainly the intent of that rider is that the borrower agrees to \u201cmaintain exclusive control<\/em>\u201d over the property. So, while James couldn\u2019t turn the home into a time-share or sign an agreement that required<\/em> her to rent the property, there was no bar to renting it in the short term. That\u2019s why the rider says that James agreed to keep the property \u201cavailable primarily <\/em>as a residence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Fannie Mae revised this rider in 2019 to make it clear that buyers were free to rent out their second homes on sites like Airbnb. As one mortgage specialist noted at the time<\/a>, the new rider \u201cexplicitly\u201d allows for those sorts of short-term rentals of second homes. And so, even if James had<\/em> rented out the Norfolk property, she probably wouldn\u2019t have violated the Fannie Mae rider.<\/p>\n

But Did James Even Rent Out Her Second Home?<\/h2>\n

The short answer is: We don\u2019t know<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The indictment says that James rented the property to a family of three and collected \u201cthousand(s) of dollars in rents received.\u201d That seems deliberately vague, suggesting perhaps that James netted tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n

In fact, she netted somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000, according to a 2020 financial disclosure<\/a> dug up by a \u201cforensic accountant\u201d named Sam Antar. In 2023, Antar was convicted of securities fraud<\/a> in connection with the Crazy Eddie electronics chain, of which he was CFO. He\u2019s since rebranded<\/a> himself as an \u201cinvestigator of financial fraud,\u201d presumably on the theory of it takes one to know one<\/em>. (Yes that) Roger Stone\u2019s \u201cStone Zone\u201d recently ran an expos\u00e9<\/a> on James drafted by Antar which included such trenchant observations as:<\/p>\n

\n

Adding to the mystery, James consistently reported this mortgage in the range of $100,000-$150,000 for three consecutive years (2020<\/a>\u20132022<\/a>), but then in 2023<\/a>, the reported value inexplicably drops to $75,000-$100,000 without explanation. While this could potentially be related to payment of principal, the absence of any official record of this mortgage in ACRIS [New York\u2019s real property registration site] makes it impossible to verify the actual terms, origination date, or even existence of this substantial financial obligation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She paid down her mortgage? Lock her up!<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Antar\u2019s smoking gun:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note that James discloses \u201crental income\u201d for a property in Brooklyn, but describes income on the Norfolk property as \u201cinvestment.\u201d According to the indictment, James rented the property to a family of three. But Halligan never says for how long, and she\u2019s pretty hand-wavey about how much rent James took in \u2014 two things she almost certainly knows, since her predecessor Erik Siebert interviewed multiple witnesses about this case. Income of less than $5,000 is consistent with a short-term rental explicitly permitted by the Fannie Mae Second Home Rider. And indeed the second half of 2020, during the height of Covid, was a time when many people were making ad hoc<\/em> living arrangements. We simply don\u2019t know what happened here. But Lindsey Halligan does know<\/em>, and she chose not to mention it in this indictment.<\/p>\n

In any event, James has not disclosed any<\/em> income from the Norfolk property, rental or otherwise, since 2020.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCrimes\u201d<\/h2>\n

Suppose for the sake of argument, that James was<\/em> prohibited from renting the Norfolk property and did so anyway.<\/p>\n

The bank fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1344, makes it a crime to \u201cknowingly execute\u201d a \u201cscheme or artifice\u201d to either defraud a bank or, more broadly, to obtain funds from the bank \u201cby means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.\u201d And 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1014 similarly makes it a crime to \u201cknowingly make[] any false statement or report\u2026 for the purpose of influencing in any way\u201d a covered mortgage lender.<\/p>\n

To convict James, the government must not only prove that she lied on the mortgage application, but that she did so \u201cknowingly\u201d and <\/em>as part of a corrupt \u201cscheme\u201d to improperly influence the mortgage lender. Prosecutors would have to show that James knew she was going to rent out the Norfolk property at the time she signed the loan application but covered up that fact and that she did so for the purpose<\/em> of defrauding the bank into offering her a lower rate of interest on the loan.<\/p>\n

In other words, if this case were to somehow go to trial, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that James concocted a fraudulent scheme in advance to get an eight-tenths-of-one-percent reduction on a modest loan that she voluntarily paid off 11 years early<\/em> \u2026 all so that she could earn a couple thousand dollars in rental income.<\/p>\n

When you say it out loud, it doesn\u2019t make much sense. And it\u2019ll probably make even less sense when James herself starts talking.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read more at Law and Chaos\u2026.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Andrew Torrez<\/a>\u00a0produce the Law and Chaos\u00a0Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0You can subscribe to their Substack by clicking the logo:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The post The Tish James Indictment Looks Like Country-Fried BS<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last week, Lindsey Halligan, the acting\/interim\/special\/imaginary US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted<\/a> New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, fulfilling a long-held goal of her client, Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

James is charged with two felonies relating to the purchase of an investment property in Norfolk, Virginia: one count of bank fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1344<\/a>, and one count of making a false statement on a mortgage application in violation of 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1014<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As with the recent indictment of James Comey, another Trump nemesis, the James indictment was so weak that regular prosecutors \u2014 i.e., ones who have actually tried criminal cases \u2014 refused to touch it<\/a>. And, as in Comey\u2019s case, Halligan was the only lawyer willing to sign off on it. So if conservative commentators<\/a> and Sam Alito(!)<\/a> are right, and her appointment was unlawful<\/a>, the case may get dismissed long before trial.<\/p>\n

Meet Virginia<\/h2>\n

Prior to this indictment, it was presumed that Halligan would indict James with respect to a different Virginia property. Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has been spelunking through financial records of Trump\u2019s enemies, and he sent a criminal referral<\/a> to Attorney General James regarding a house in Norfolk. But apparently Halligan punted on The Case of the Errant Power of Attorney<\/em>, an extraneous document which erroneously described the property as a personal residence, when every other piece of the loan application correctly described it as a rental. Worst Nancy Drew mystery ever!<\/p>\n

Instead she charged James with lying on a mortgage application for a different house in Norfolk, which James purchased in August of 2020 for $137,000. She received a loan for 80 percent of the purchase price from Old Virginia Mortgage (now known as OVM Financial), which she appears to have paid off in 2024.<\/p>\n

According to the indictment, James falsely claimed that she planned to use the house as a second home in order to lower her interest rate from 3.815 to 3.0 percent, saving herself $17,837 over the four-year life of the loan. In a conclusory fashion, but without providing any evidence, it states that James \u201cknowingly\u201d made false statements on the loan document. This has a certain irony, since James prosecuted Trump for falsely inflating his net worth on mortgage applications, something he claimed was a victimless crime so long as the lender was paid in full. The government also claims that the reduced rate netted James just over an extra $1,000 in the seller\u2019s credit at settlement.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the indictment yaddayaddayaddas<\/em> over several elements of the supposed crime, which strongly suggests that it was done on purpose because filling in the blanks would fatally undermine the prosecution.<\/p>\n

The Low Rider<\/h2>\n

Paragraph 6 of the indictment alleges that:<\/p>\n

\n

The loan was originated by OVM Financial under a signed Second Home Rider, which required James, as the sole borrower, to occupy and use the property as her secondary residence and prohibited its use as a timesharing or other shared ownership agreement or agreement that requires her to rent the property or give any person any control over the occupancy or use of the property.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That language roughly mirrors Fannie Mae Form 3890<\/a>, which James almost certainly signed as part of her mortgage application. It says:<\/p>\n

\n

6. Occupancy. Borrower must occupy and use the Property as Borrower\u2019s second home. Borrower will maintain exclusive control over the occupancy of the Property, including short-term rentals, and will not subject the Property to any timesharing or other shared ownership arrangement or to any rental pool or agreement that requires Borrower either to rent the Property or give a management firm or any other person or entity any control over the occupancy or use of the Property. Borrower will keep the Property available primarily as a residence for Borrower\u2019s personal use and enjoyment for at least one year after the date of this Security Instrument, unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing, which consent will not be unreasonably withheld, or unless extenuating circumstances exist that are beyond Borrower\u2019s control.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Plainly the intent of that rider is that the borrower agrees to \u201cmaintain exclusive control<\/em>\u201d over the property. So, while James couldn\u2019t turn the home into a time-share or sign an agreement that required<\/em> her to rent the property, there was no bar to renting it in the short term. That\u2019s why the rider says that James agreed to keep the property \u201cavailable primarily <\/em>as a residence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Fannie Mae revised this rider in 2019 to make it clear that buyers were free to rent out their second homes on sites like Airbnb. As one mortgage specialist noted at the time<\/a>, the new rider \u201cexplicitly\u201d allows for those sorts of short-term rentals of second homes. And so, even if James had<\/em> rented out the Norfolk property, she probably wouldn\u2019t have violated the Fannie Mae rider.<\/p>\n

But Did James Even Rent Out Her Second Home?<\/h2>\n

The short answer is: We don\u2019t know<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The indictment says that James rented the property to a family of three and collected \u201cthousand(s) of dollars in rents received.\u201d That seems deliberately vague, suggesting perhaps that James netted tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.<\/p>\n

In fact, she netted somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000, according to a 2020 financial disclosure<\/a> dug up by a \u201cforensic accountant\u201d named Sam Antar. In 2023, Antar was convicted of securities fraud<\/a> in connection with the Crazy Eddie electronics chain, of which he was CFO. He\u2019s since rebranded<\/a> himself as an \u201cinvestigator of financial fraud,\u201d presumably on the theory of it takes one to know one<\/em>. (Yes that) Roger Stone\u2019s \u201cStone Zone\u201d recently ran an expos\u00e9<\/a> on James drafted by Antar which included such trenchant observations as:<\/p>\n

\n

Adding to the mystery, James consistently reported this mortgage in the range of $100,000-$150,000 for three consecutive years (2020<\/a>\u20132022<\/a>), but then in 2023<\/a>, the reported value inexplicably drops to $75,000-$100,000 without explanation. While this could potentially be related to payment of principal, the absence of any official record of this mortgage in ACRIS [New York\u2019s real property registration site] makes it impossible to verify the actual terms, origination date, or even existence of this substantial financial obligation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She paid down her mortgage? Lock her up!<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Antar\u2019s smoking gun:<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note that James discloses \u201crental income\u201d for a property in Brooklyn, but describes income on the Norfolk property as \u201cinvestment.\u201d According to the indictment, James rented the property to a family of three. But Halligan never says for how long, and she\u2019s pretty hand-wavey about how much rent James took in \u2014 two things she almost certainly knows, since her predecessor Erik Siebert interviewed multiple witnesses about this case. Income of less than $5,000 is consistent with a short-term rental explicitly permitted by the Fannie Mae Second Home Rider. And indeed the second half of 2020, during the height of Covid, was a time when many people were making ad hoc<\/em> living arrangements. We simply don\u2019t know what happened here. But Lindsey Halligan does know<\/em>, and she chose not to mention it in this indictment.<\/p>\n

In any event, James has not disclosed any<\/em> income from the Norfolk property, rental or otherwise, since 2020.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCrimes\u201d<\/h2>\n

Suppose for the sake of argument, that James was<\/em> prohibited from renting the Norfolk property and did so anyway.<\/p>\n

The bank fraud statute, 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1344, makes it a crime to \u201cknowingly execute\u201d a \u201cscheme or artifice\u201d to either defraud a bank or, more broadly, to obtain funds from the bank \u201cby means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.\u201d And 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 1014 similarly makes it a crime to \u201cknowingly make[] any false statement or report\u2026 for the purpose of influencing in any way\u201d a covered mortgage lender.<\/p>\n

To convict James, the government must not only prove that she lied on the mortgage application, but that she did so \u201cknowingly\u201d and <\/em>as part of a corrupt \u201cscheme\u201d to improperly influence the mortgage lender. Prosecutors would have to show that James knew she was going to rent out the Norfolk property at the time she signed the loan application but covered up that fact and that she did so for the purpose<\/em> of defrauding the bank into offering her a lower rate of interest on the loan.<\/p>\n

In other words, if this case were to somehow go to trial, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that James concocted a fraudulent scheme in advance to get an eight-tenths-of-one-percent reduction on a modest loan that she voluntarily paid off 11 years early<\/em> \u2026 all so that she could earn a couple thousand dollars in rental income.<\/p>\n

When you say it out loud, it doesn\u2019t make much sense. And it\u2019ll probably make even less sense when James herself starts talking.<\/p>\n

Subscribe to read more at Law and Chaos\u2026.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Andrew Torrez<\/a>\u00a0produce the Law and Chaos\u00a0Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0You can subscribe to their Substack by clicking the logo:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The post The Tish James Indictment Looks Like Country-Fried BS<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Lindsey Halligan, the acting\/interim\/special\/imaginary US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, fulfilling a long-held goal of her client, Donald Trump. James is charged with two felonies relating to the purchase of an investment property in Norfolk, Virginia: one count of bank fraud […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":135123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/law-and-chaos-logo-liz-dye-300x153-IpGecy.jpg?fit=300%2C153&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}