ALBANY – A prosecutor in the New York attorney general’s office sent an agency-wide email to hundreds of colleagues Friday claiming that he had been instructed by his supervisor “to find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump,” according to a copy of the email obtained by the Times Union.
The prosecutor, who was assigned to the Investor Protection Bureau, alleged in his email that his bureau chief, Shamiso Maswoswe, had directed him to target “Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger) … without having a credible reason for targeting this organizations and individuals.”
The email sent early Friday by Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, who records show has worked for the attorney general’s office for about seven years, was quickly deleted from the office’s servers and vanished from the inboxes of more than 2,000 employees. A follow-up agency-wide email subsequently sent by one of Attorney General Letitia James’ executive assistants informed employees that it was an “internal” matter and that no one in the office was “in danger,” according to three people familiar with the communication.
Wiesenfeld has been assigned to the Investor Protection Bureau for at least several years, working from the office’s Liberty Street headquarters in Manhattan’s financial district. He has been assigned to some of the office’s most significant cases, including one announced in April in which the attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc., and Gemini, Titan LLC that accused the companies of illegally running gambling operations through their “prediction market” platforms.
The email’s mention of the Hewlett-Packard merger refers to the ongoing opposition of multiple state attorneys general – including James’ office – to that tech giant’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, an information technology company.
“This is a personnel matter, and the employee in question has been placed on administrative leave with full pay,” Alexis Richards, a spokesperson for James, said in statement in response to a request for comment. “The office of the attorney general is committed to upholding New York’s laws and protecting the rights and freedoms of all New Yorkers, regardless of political beliefs. We strongly reject any assertion to the contrary.”
Wiesenfeld could not be reached for comment on Saturday.
Some employees said they had not read his email before it was deleted, but then saw the follow-up email from the executive assistant.
“If you believe Trump is using (Department of Justice) attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish (James) is doing exactly the same thing,” Wiesenfeld wrote. “I ask that you not serve as Tish’s personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies. Instead, I hope you choose to prosecute crimes and find the individuals accountable, rather than targeting individuals and then finding crimes.”
Wiesenfeld also accused James of using “significant public taxpayer dollars to target convenient public enemies” while taking no action against what he described as “rampant nonprofit homeless shelter fraud and antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues.”
His opening sentence in the email said the “best part of having f__ you money is being able to tell the truth, without fear of consequences so here we go” – an apparent reference to the concept of having sufficient financial resources.
The extraordinary email and the accusations it made underscore the vitriolic political relationship that Trump and James have had with each other for the past decade.
During her inaugural campaign for attorney general, James publicly pledged that if elected she would investigate Trump’s business dealings: “We will prosecute the president for crimes committed in New York state,” James said in December 2018, a month after she was elected attorney general.
She appeared to follow through on that pledge in 2024, when a judge ordered the then-former president, his two sons and a former Trump company official to pay a more than $360 million penalty for “ill-gotten gains” in a civil case pursued by James’ office. The penalty was imposed after the Trump Organization was found liable by a Manhattan judge for allegations that Trump had lied about his wealth and overstated property values in documents to secure loans that helped build his real estate empire.
Trump appealed the verdict and the penalty. In August 2025, a New York appellate court upheld the verdict but threw out the massive financial penalty.
The U.S. Department of Justice, during Trump’s second administration, has also pursued criminal investigations against James personally, including a federal criminal case accusing the attorney general of various mortgage and bank fraud crimes that was shopped around to different federal prosecutors before being thrown out by federal judges.
In April 2025, James hired well-known criminal defense attorney Abbe Lowell to respond to the allegations when they were first made by a Trump administration official who said some of her real estate and mortgage transactions dating back decades may have been fraudulent.
In a six-page letter Lowell sent to then-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that month, Lowell accused Trump of seeking to weaponize the Justice Department by targeting James as part of a “political retribution” campaign for the investigations her office has conducted into his business dealings.
Trump, in turn, has accused James of directing her office to pursue cases against him during and after his first term.
The back-and-forth allegations of weaponizing their respective administrations have not dissipated, and the state attorney general’s office has pursued dozens of civil actions against Trump’s administration.
Bondi’s appointment last year of John A. Sarcone III as an acting U.S. attorney in New York’s Northern District, which includes the state Capitol, had allegedly been made at the behest of Trump insiders who wanted Sarcone to use his position to tangle with James, according to a person with knowledge of the background on that appointment.
But Sarcone’s tenure as the district’s top federal prosecutor has been controversial, and a federal appeals court affirmed earlier this month that he was not lawfully appointed to his position last year and was therefore not legally able to issue subpoenas to the attorney general’s office.
That case began last year as a challenge to two federal grand jury subpoenas that had been served on James’ office as part of a now-stalled investigation into its handling of two cases – one involving the National Rifle Association and her pursuit of Trump’s family businesses.
Sarcone obtained the subpoenas last year after his initial 120-day term as interim U.S. attorney had expired. The subpoenas identified him solely as “acting United States’ attorney” and did not invoke his separate titles as first assistant or special attorney.
The federal appeals court noted in its recent decision that the underlying grand jury was discharged on March 9, meaning the subpoenas are no longer enforceable.
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This article originally published at NY prosecutor claims Letitia James’ office directed him to target Trump.
