New York AG Letitia James just backed Donald Trump into a no-win corner

| 7:13 pm EST December 9, 2021
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When New York Attorney General Letitia James announced months ago that she was running for Governor of New York in 2022, it set up an interesting split screen: she was going to be attempting to finish off Donald Trump in her role as AG while she was also campaigning for Governor. How was that going to work?

Now James has made that moot, suspending her campaign for Governor. Why is she doing this? The most likely reason is that new polling released this week had her a whopping eighteen points behind current Governor Kathy Hochul in a Democratic primary matchup. As we wrote back the Hochul first became Governor, incumbency counts for a lot in a primary race, even when that incumbency has been very brief in Hochul’s case.

In any case, even as James is bailing the race for Governor, she’s making more clear than ever that she intends to finish Donald Trump off. She announced that she’s subpoenaing Trump to testify in the civil case she’s running against the Trump Organization.

This leaves Trump with a few options, all of them bad. He can show up and testify in defense of the Trump Organization, in the hope of weakening James’ civil case. But in such case he’ll have to try to thread the needle of trying to improve his odds in the civil case without incriminating himself in the criminal case that James is also running against him. Trump would also have to try to avoid getting caught committing perjury in his civil testimony, because that would result in easy criminal charges against him.

Trump’s second is to simply not show up, and try to stall in court. But what’s he going to argue, privilege? That argument is getting January 6th Committee witnesses indicted. In such case James could take a run at Trump for contempt charges.

Trump’s third option would be to invoke the Fifth Amendment as an excuse to not testify at all, or to not answer certain questions. But that would just make it a whole lot easier for James to win her civil case and seize the Trump Organization’s assets. And if Trump pleads the fifth in a civil case brought by New York State, the court of public opinion is going to conclude that he’s very guilty.

So Donald Trump has nothing but bad options here. He can pick whichever one he wants. None of them are magic wands. Letitia James has clearly been plotting this out for some time. Keep in mind that James is suddenly demanding that Trump testify in the civil case in early January, at almost the same time incoming Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will take the local reins of the joint criminal case that the DA’s office and the AG’s office have going against Donald Trump. It’ll be fascinating to see how these pieces all come together.