New York’s Badass AG

On a rainy spring night, about 30 miles north of Manhattan, New York Attorney General Letitia James marched onto the stage at Westchester Community College. Standing nearly six feet tall and dressed in a drapey black suit (not unlike a judicial robe), she smiled broadly. Four of her comrades in legal arms—Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, California’s Rob Bonta, Illinois’s Kwame Raoul, and New Jersey’s Matt Platkin—followed closely behind, as a multiracial crowd of hundreds rose and cheered raucously.

Since January, these AGs have challenged the Trump administration 30 times (and counting). But James has stood out, not only from the other AGs but also among top Democrats in the Empire State. This crowd was here for her.

New York City is home to the most powerful Democrats in Congress: Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. But the most effective and popular Democrat representing New York is the Brooklyn woman known as Tish—a former Legal Aid attorney, legislative aide, City Council member, and New York City public advocate—who was elected attorney general in 2018. She’s a savvy politician, endorsing Zohran Mamdani right after he won the June Democratic mayoral primary, when other party leaders kept their distance.

But James’s biggest claim to fame is as a fierce fighter against Trumpism.

No attorney general in the country is battling President Donald Trump more proficiently—and drawing more of his fire—than James. When Trump was out of office, she brought the successful civil case charging him and his company with business fraud for alternately inflating and deflating the value of his assets in order to reduce property taxes and obtain favorable rates from banks and insurance companies. The case resulted in a $454 million fine, which Trump is appealing.

Since Trump’s reelection, James has emerged as a North Star in the chaos, inspiring progressives in New York and nationally. “Tish James and the other state AGs on the front lines of this fight are not only defending a Constitution and federal laws against a Supreme Leader and lawless autocrats,” says Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “They are also showing the country what real attorneys general do by acting for the people and the rule of law instead of a right-wing political putsch.”

James and her partner AGs have hit the president with a barrage of lawsuits that have temporarily halted some of his worst orders in the past seven months. Their cases blocked efforts to freeze federal funding; stopped the termination of federal workers fired illegally; blocked Elon Musk’s DOGE from access to sensitive US Treasury material; halted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s efforts to decimate Health and Human Services staffing; and temporarily restored $11 billion in health grants to states and cities. In early June, a court blocked the Trump administration’s move to shutter the AmeriCorps program after New York and 24 other states joined a lawsuit to protect the popular federal community-service initiative.

But while James is proud of the work of the AGs, she is honest about the fact that it isn’t nearly enough given Trump’s all-out assault on democracy. Congressional Republicans, James says, “have just handed over their authority to the executive. They, too, are afraid of MAGA. And they’ve just conceded their constitutional authority…. And so our job [as attorneys general] is obviously trying to make change with these lawsuits, but also to organize and to have events like we had in Westchester.”

Whether their legal actions will help to permanently blunt the worst of Trump’s agenda remains to be seen, given that major cases remain pending in the Supreme Court. But they are certainly getting people’s attention. Eileen O’Connor, a nurse practitioner and leader of the NYCD16/15-Indivisible group, attended the town hall and thanked James for her work protecting the Trump-threatened funding for Medicaid, Medicare, public safety, and public education. “In terms of the pro-democracy movement, it’s important that she’s continuing to stand up to Trump. People are really heartened by that: ‘Oh, yeah, Tish, she’s doing it!’” Too many people are discouraged and unsure how to fight back during this second Trump regime, O’Connor says. “But Tish breaks through a lot of the noise, and that’s important.”

That ability to break through the noise has earned James praise—and a hefty boost—among much of her state’s otherwise disgruntled Democratic base. “It’s my great pleasure to introduce… our badass attorney general, Tish James!” Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins said to the excited town hall crowd.

The evening was billed as a “hearing” to gather information on Trump’s assault on the entire public sector, but James likened it to a “road show” that she and her AG colleagues were taking around the country. They’re not just gathering evidence; they’re also trying to buoy the resistance to the second coming of Trump.

“This isn’t a community meeting, this is a damn rally,” Tom Hart, the president of Local 94 Operating Engineers in New York City, told the crowd as he praised James and others for at least temporarily restoring healthcare for disabled 9/11 survivors and first responders. Nine-year-old Kory Skipper-Miller wowed the crowd by explaining to “Ms. Tish” and the others the importance of maintaining the social and veterans’ benefits that his mother, grandmother, and brother rely on. In addition to Kory, others talked about their worries over veterans’ services that have already been declining and are slated for more cuts, while other speakers lamented the coming educational cuts.

While it may seem as though James and her fellow AGs emerged as legal freedom fighters overnight, in reality their efforts were months in the making. As James told me, the AGs—often working collectively under the umbrella of the Democratic Attorneys General Association—began meeting to discuss fighting a second Trump administration before the 2024 election.

“It was not the outcome that we expected, but it was something that we had to prepare for nonetheless,” James told me three weeks after the Westchester town hall. We had met for coffee at a café in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where waitstaff and constituents warmly interrupted us. “And so we analyzed Project 2025 based on subject matter,” she continued. “We looked at jurisdiction, we looked at standing, we looked at past practices, we looked at who had been active in certain areas, and we decided to assign our staffs different responsibilities based on possible cases. And we started preparing complaints and briefs.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who sued Trump more than 120 times in his first term, told The Hill that the group even wrote briefs in advance of Trump’s orders, so officials “just need to cross the Ts, dot the Is, and press print and file it.”

They gathered mainly on Zoom, with as many as 23 Democratic AG offices participating in the calls, Ellison told me. New York and California “are significantly bigger than the rest of us,” he noted, and that made collaboration essential. “They have more resources at their command and are in a position to do things that nobody else is really able to do. [James has] chosen to be maximally generous and work with all the rest of us who are much smaller, sharing resources, sharing herself.”

James laughed at that. “When I was elected,” she said, “I discovered after attending a National Association of Attorneys General meeting that the previous attorneys general of New York, who I will not mention, had not cooperated.”

“It was shocking when I walked into a conference and someone yelled, ‘New York is here!’” James continued. “I’m like, ‘So?’ But New York had never been there, and that’s sad. My approach is to share the vast resources of the New York State Office of the Attorney General with smaller states, particularly at a time when we’re all under attack and when it’s going to take all of us to stand up.”

The New York attorney general’s office employs 1,700 people, 700 of them lawyers; California’s has 5,400 workers, including 1,100 attorneys. By contrast, Ellison employs 440 staffers, 193 of whom are attorneys or attorney managers, and Rhode Island’s office—run by Peter Neronha, one of the Democratic AGs in this alliance of 23—employs 257 people and 103 attorneys.

“So Tish could devote three or four staffers on an issue, whereas I might be able to spare one or two and some states, none,” Ellison said. Their efforts have been a lifeline to other state leaders. “Many of us in state governments, not just New York, literally get up every morning saying, ‘Our only hope is the court system,’” said New York state Senator Liz Krueger, a longtime ally of James. “We need an attorney general to stand up and say, ‘This isn’t legal—we’re going to go to court.’ And that’s exactly what Tish James is attempting to do on many critical issues.”

In their quest to hold Trump accountable, James and her fellow Democratic AGs have become arguably even more important today than they were during Trump’s first term, when they boasted an 83 percent win rate in cases challenging the administration’s agenda. Since January, they have become the main actors holding the line against the administration’s unprecedented lawlessness.

The Democratic AGs don’t always win. But they often delay and complicate Trump’s agenda, and they are establishing a legal record for eventually upending it. Just as important, they are taking the fight to Trump and the administration with a boldness that is often missing on Capitol Hill.

For instance, James and her partner AGs were ready for Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship the day he announced it. “Of 23 Democratic AGs, two are birthright babies,” James said with a chuckle. (They are Illinois’s Kwame Raoul and William Tong of Connecticut.) Several federal judges immediately blocked Trump’s order, but the Supreme Court ruled in June that district courts have far less power to impose national injunctions, though the court didn’t rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship itself. As of publication time, a third court has blocked the birthright citizenship order from going into effect.

Likewise, when anti-deportation protests escalated in Los Angeles, and Trump sent in the National Guard against the wishes of the state’s governor, California AG Rob Bonta sued him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in federal court. James quickly filed an amicus brief, but a federal district court panel ruled against Bonta, allowing the administration to continue controlling the National Guard troops.

Even when there are setbacks, James says she isn’t discouraged, citing the AGs’ consistent victories in the lower courts. “The courts have held up,” James told me. “They’ve been one institution that has held up against fascism, against this consolidation of executive power, this reorganization of government. They’ve held up despite the threats and the harassment to the courts—to the point where judges have to get private security.”

Judges aren’t the only ones facing threats. since challenging Trump, James has received death threats and has had to strengthen her security detail, telling Pod Save America in 2023 that she fears a “lone wolf.” But she does her job anyway. In April 2024, 26-year-old Tyler Vogel of upstate New York pleaded guilty to charges that he sent text messages threatening James with “death and physical harm” if she did not “cease action” against Trump in the courts. “Listen, my security folks, they worry about me all the time, but I still walk the streets of Brooklyn,” she told me.

Trump himself regularly vilifies James, calling her a “low IQ individual.” The president has a habit of demeaning women of color with that slur, from James to Vice President Kamala Harris to Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett, a rising Democratic star. In May, Trump moved from insults to threats, unleashing his Justice Department on James over issues related to her cosigning of mortgage documents to help a niece buy a home in Virginia in 2023, four years after she became New York attorney general. One of many documents stated, incorrectly, that James would use the home as a primary residence.

“They’re accusing me of engaging in all types of badassery around these mortgage docs,” James said. “They found a power of attorney that was prepared by someone else that I signed, which basically said that I was a resident of Virginia. But prior to that, I had indicated that I was not going to be a resident of Virginia. I put it in all-caps in the mortgage documents! But nonetheless, they’re making this out to be something it is not.”

James’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told the Justice Department that the administration had “cherry-picked an August 17, 2023 power of attorney that mistakenly stated the property to be Ms. James’ principal residence…. The broker understood this, and that Ms. James was not a Virginia resident.”

The Justice Department is also investigating charges that James understated the number of units in her Brooklyn home, again for mortgage advantages.

Trump revoked James’s security clearance and also denied her other “federal privileges”—but she says she doesn’t even know what that means: “I go into federal buildings all the time.”

Trump insists that James is “a total crook” and promises that his Justice Department will pursue the charges against her to the fullest. James doesn’t want to minimize the threats. “I’m more afraid for my family members in Virginia,” she told me. “Individuals have driven by the house in these big eight-wheel trucks with Trump flags. On some of these right-wing websites, they post their addresses and their pictures. And these are women and children, and absolutely private citizens.”

Liz Krueger laughs at the charges against James, but not at the potential danger to her. “Do I actually think the attorney general of the state of New York signed documents saying ‘my primary residency is going to be in another state?’” she said. “No, I do not. I do not. But he really is going after her.”

Another sideshow James has had to deal with this year was the reemergence of disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was the front-runner to be New York City’s mayor until his lifeless, cynical campaign was upended by the landslide primary win of the democratic socialist state Assembly member Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo has since announced plans to run as an independent in the November general election.

James and Cuomo had once been allies. When he was governor, Cuomo appointed James—who had run alongside him as the attorney general candidate in 2018, to the disappointment of her admirers and the progressive Working Families Party, which had been her political home—to investigate the sexual harassment accusations against him by current and former staffers. For a while, it seemed that Cuomo was hiding behind James. “Let the attorney general do her job,” he told reporters at a March 2021 press conference. “She’s very good, she’s very competent, and that will be due process and then we’ll have the facts.”

Many of James’s supporters worried about her independence from the governor. “I was very concerned,” said Lindsey Boylan, a former employee of the governor’s office who made an early claim of harassment. “I was concerned because of the power he still seems to exert over other powerful people. Obviously, my fears were unfounded.”

Ultimately, James released a 165-page investigative report in August 2021 finding that Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 women. (In the years since, the number of accusers has risen to 13.) Cuomo was livid, filing an ethics complaint against James that has so far gone nowhere, and running up close to $20 million in taxpayer-funded legal fees going after his accusers. He has since characterized James as practicing “a brand of ugly politics I had never seen before” and says that she was driven by political ambition.

James dropped her own bid for governor in late 2021. “There was no way that I could manage the office, stay on top of investigations and litigation, and at the same time run for governor,” she told a reporter at the time. “I decided to withdraw and also recognize that my heart really wasn’t in it.”

These days, it’s clear where her heart is—and her energy.

In the weeks since I began writing about James and her fellow AGs’ crusade, the Trump administration’s abuses of power have only escalated. In July, Trump managed to secure congressional support, along strict party lines, for his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which features the largest cuts to social-safety- net programs in history, as well as a budget-busting tax cut for the wealthy. These cuts—some of which will be enacted immediately, and others that won’t be enacted for years—are being imposed by Congress, not through presidential executive orders, and it is unclear whether there is anything that James and her team of AGs can do to stop them, let alone the mass deportations that the legislation supercharges.

“American democracy will not be saved in a court of law,” Keith Ellison told the Westchester crowd. “It will be in a court of American opinion. We need you to keep coming to meetings like this. Go to those [upcoming] rallies.”

Ellison knows that mass protest, and massive anti-Trump voting, will ultimately do more to dislodge the autocrat from power than attorneys general can. On the day we learned about the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses—Ellison was also on the alleged assassin’s hit list—an estimated 5 million Americans turned out for the No Kings rallies nonetheless.

James shares the view that protests are going to be a crucial part of pushing back against Trump. I asked her if she thinks the nation’s top two Democratic leaders, Schumer and Jeffries, are doing enough to meet the moment. James chose her words carefully: “I love them both,” she said. “They’re close friends of mine, but they’re not into performative politics. They’re very cerebral. And they’re very deliberate. They always have been, they always will be.”

James believes that the Democratic leadership “needs to bring in more young people. They need to take their cues from AOC and from Jasmine Crockett and Maxwell Frost and Greg Cesar. They need to be on the ground. They need to do things that are different. Republicans are just outperforming us each and every time. We have to stop believing or following the rules. Break the rules. Stop coloring inside the lines.”

Though her preferred candidate in the New York mayoral primary, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, didn’t win, James quickly embraced Mamdani after his victory. She went to his party on election night and praised the youthful, multiracial movement that propelled his campaign. “Tonight represents a resounding win,” James told the crowd.

By endorsing Mamdani even as Schumer and Jeffries kept quiet, and by marching joyfully with him in June’s New York Pride parade, James solidified her standing with the city’s progressive movement.

The unifying role she’s playing is stirring speculation that James, who is 66, could yet be a 2028 US Senate prospect or a 2030 gubernatorial contender. People approached her to run for mayor this year, James admits. But she wasn’t about to step away from the fight against Trump and Trumpism. “I was focused on protecting our democracy, and I didn’t want to get distracted,” she told me. “Once that job is done…?” That was classic Tish James: focused on the job at hand, ready to sacrifice in order to complete her tasks, and certain that, once she has prevailed, there will be more opportunities for New York’s badass attorney general.

More from The Nation

Many in the party see workers as drifting rightward. But new data show they’re more progressive than ever on economic issues—if Democrats are willing to meet them there.

Bhaskar Sunkara

Amid reports that Cuomo is consulting with Trump and telling business leaders he doesn’t want a fight with the president, Zohran Mamdani sees a “betrayal of the city.”

John Nichols

There’s no way for Republicans to tamp down the Epstein-Maxwell scandal if the president keeps telling on himself.

Joan Walsh

A probing, formidable reporter, Mintz broke major stories on corporate crime and fraud in the consumer, environmental, and workplace arenas.

Obituary / Ralph Nader