New York AG Letitia James makes first public appearance at Mamdani rally after mortgage fraud indictment

State Attorney General Letitia James headlined a rally for New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani on Monday night.

It was her first appearance since her indictment last week on federal mortgage fraud charges in Virginia.

Dressed all in black, James came out to applause and raised her fist to the crowd.

James did not mention the charges against her or President Donald Trump, who had vowed to target the attorney general, but she did allude to him.

"I know what it feels like to be attacked for just doing your job," she said. "But I will fear no man."

James was indicted last week by a grand jury. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, has charged her with mortgage fraud and making false statements to a financial institution in the purchase of a secondary home for $137,000 in Norfolk, Virginia.

According to the indictment, James obtained a more favorable federally-backed mortgage rate by falsely stating that the apartment would be a second home when it was actually an investment property. Virginia prosecutors charge that she rented it out to a family of three. With the better interest rate, James would be able to save $17,837 over the lifetime of the loan, according to court papers.

"No one is above the law. The charges as alleged in this case represent intentional, criminal acts and tremendous breaches of the public’s trust," U. S. Attorney Lindsay Halligan said in a statement. "The facts and the law in this case are clear, and we will continue following them to ensure that justice is served."

James has not formally entered a plea, but she has called the charges "baseless."

"This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system," she said after the indictment was unsealed.

James is due in court for her first appearance on Oct. 24.

The attorney general sued Trump, his charity and his first administration more than 66 times.

James won a multimillion-dollar judgment against the Trump Organization that barred his company from doing business in New York. In the lawsuit, she claimed that the business inflated its value by billions of dollars.

"For years, Donald Trump engaged in massive fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization," she said after the judge’s verdict. "While he may have authored the ‘Art of the Deal,’ our case revealed that his business was based on the art of the steal."

An appellate court threw out the financial penalty, which had ballooned above $500 million, but affirmed the judge’s ruling that Trump had committed fraud.

Trump's lawyer Alina Habba, who now serves as the U.S. attorney in Newark, accused James of playing politics.

"This verdict is a manifest injustice — plain and simple," Habba said after the Trump trial. "It is the culmination of a multiyear, politically fueled witch hunt that was designed to 'take down Donald Trump,' before Letitia James ever stepped foot into the attorney general’s office."