A top prosecutor in Virginia is outright refusing to back down against “intense pressure from President Donald Trump” to file criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Elizabeth Yusi, who oversees major criminal prosecutions in the Norfolk office of the Eastern District of Virginia, has informed her colleagues that she plans to decline to seek charges against James.
Yusi has been crystal clear with co-workers, confiding that she simply sees “no probable cause to believe James engaged in mortgage fraud,” according to sources familiar with her internal discussions. If you’ve been following the news, you know that this kind of resistance comes with a serious risk.
Yusi plans to present her conclusion to the president’s new interim U.S. attorney, Lindsey Halligan, in the coming weeks, but everyone is “bracing for the top supervisor in Norfolk to be fired” for her resistance. This whole situation is tragic, as it highlights how career prosecutors are being “forced to choose between honoring their oaths and risking their livelihood” because of the administration’s actions, per MSNBC.
Trump can’t get someone to do his dirty work
Randall Eliason, a former top public corruption prosecutor, didn’t mince words, saying that this supervisor “clearly is doing the right and ethical thing by refusing to bend her legal conclusions to fit the president’s desire for political retribution.” The fact that this is even a possibility shows just how politicized the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia has become; it’s essentially a flash point in the Trump administration’s persecution of his perceived enemies.
The heat on Yusi and her colleagues is no accident, either. Trump installed Halligan, an insurance lawyer who was previously his personal defense lawyer and a White House aide with “no prosecutorial experience,” to the top spot after firing the first acting U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert. Siebert also had the good sense to resist seeking fraud charges against James, and he later resigned after realizing he’d lose his job.
And the DOJ declined to press charges because none of the investigations turned anything up. The Senate declined to recommend an investigation to the DOJ. If there was something there, don’t you think Comer would have run the evidence himself to HQ?
— Sarah Young (@Sarah_young5314) October 2, 2025
Just a few days after Halligan took the reins, she “sought and won the indictment” of former FBI Director James Comey, in a case that Siebert and other career prosecutors in the office considered “too weak to charge.” This move was a clear message to the office, and now, career prosecutors are rightfully worried that their colleagues will be pressured to seek an indictment against James or, you guessed it, “risk being fired.” Halligan has apparently been “closely monitoring progress on the case,” which I’d say is probably not helping morale in the office.
This is all happening because Trump has publicly and repeatedly called for the Justice Department to criminally prosecute James, an attorney who, to be fair, successfully sued him and the Trump Organization for what she called a series of fraudulent business practices. She secured a 2023 civil fraud verdict and a significant financial penalty, so there’s clearly bad blood between them.
Trump’s reaction has been completely over the top, even by his standards. In a Truth Social post Saturday, he called James “SCUM,” saying she should be removed as New York attorney general and pointing to what he called “her WITCH HUNT against President Donald J. Trump, and others.” He went on to publicly call on Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., claiming they were “all guilty as hell.” He wrote that “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility” and demanded, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
