President Trump said Letitia James is “totally corrupt” and warned seven former Cornell fraternity brothers will not get a fair shake after Gov. Kathy Hochul named her special prosecutor.
Standing outside the White House on Friday before flying to a midterm rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump answered questions about Hochul’s move and did not mince words about New York’s attorney general. Newsmax reported his assessment live as he left Washington.
“Well, Letitia James is a corrupt person. She's totally corrupt,” Trump said.
“And I can't imagine it... and I feel badly for whoever she's looking at because they won't get a fair shake. Letitia James is a corrupt person.”
The comments came one day after Hochul removed Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten and installed James to oversee the criminal investigation into alleged sexual assault at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. That decision followed the same pattern already covered when Hochul handed the Cornell probe to James after saying she had lost confidence in the local prosecutor.
A woman identified as Jane Doe filed a 101-page lawsuit last month in Manhattan Supreme Court. The suit accuses seven former fraternity brothers of raping her at the house after they allegedly plied her with alcohol and what she was told was ketamine, then subjected her to an hourslong assault. No final charges are described as filed in the available account, and the men are not named in the reporting.
Van Houten first declined to bring charges, then reopened the criminal investigation last month. Hochul pulled him from the case Thursday anyway. On Wednesday she also said Cornell had agreed to hire outside counsel for an independent look at how the university handled the rape allegations.
AP News detailed Hochul’s sharper critique of the earlier handling. She said the accuser was failed by campus police and by a district attorney who closed the matter without interviewing her or others, and without even requesting a full transcript. Cornell University Police, she indicated, failed to convey the woman’s clear statement that she was certain she had been raped when materials went to prosecutors.
“In what world does the district attorney not even interview her, or anyone else involved, or even request the full transcript?” Hochul asked.
“This woman, this young woman, had already endured something that is utterly unspeakable. And then at every turn, she was failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her.”
James, for her part, said Friday her office would review the evidence, gather more, and interview witnesses before deciding whether prosecution is warranted. The New York Post carried her office’s pledge in similar terms: review the facts, gather evidence, interview witnesses, and pursue prosecutions if warranted.
Trump had already spoken about the Cornell matter on Thursday, before leaving for rallies in Texas and Oklahoma. “I don’t know that much about it, but Cornell is a fine school, and I’m sure they’ll do what’s right,” he said then. By Friday the appointment of James had hardened his view, a point also tracked when Trump questioned fair treatment under James in the same dispute.
The friction is not new. Before the 2024 election, James’s office sued Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization in a civil fraud case. It alleged they inflated asset values on financial statements to win better loan and insurance terms. A judgment required Trump to pay more than $450 million including interest. A New York appeals court last year threw out the financial penalty as excessive while leaving other parts of the judgment in place.
In 2025, Trump’s Department of Justice charged James with one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution over a Virginia home purchase. A federal judge later dismissed the indictment without prejudice after ruling that then-interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan had been unlawfully appointed to lead the Eastern District of Virginia and therefore lacked authority to secure the indictment.
That history sits behind Trump’s Friday warning. Putting a prosecutor with a long public record of pursuing him in charge of a high-profile campus case raises basic fairness questions for the accused, whatever the strength of the underlying allegations. Similar concerns about motive inside her office have surfaced before, including when a deleted email raised targeting claims tied to her work against Trump.
Hochul’s choice also sidelined the elected local prosecutor after he had already reopened the file. Van Houten has been described as backing the special-prosecutor appointment even while arguing the university never gave his office the full picture. The sequence still leaves the public watching a governor strip a county DA mid-case and hand the file to the state’s most politically visible attorney general.
Serious sexual-assault allegations deserve a clean, professional investigation. Victims deserve to be heard. Defendants deserve a process that does not look like score-settling. Hochul’s appointment of James, after the civil fraud crusade and the later federal case that collapsed on appointment grounds, fails that basic test of appearance.
Other legal fights involving James have followed the same pattern of aggressive theory meeting judicial pushback, including when a Biden-appointed judge dismissed a James-led challenge tied to Trump-era governance fights. Pattern matters when the same official is handed fresh criminal power.
James now controls the next steps: evidence review, witness interviews, and the call on whether to charge seven unnamed former students. Hochul has framed the switch as protection for a young woman failed by campus police and a hesitant DA. Trump has framed it as putting a partisan adversary in position to deny the accused a fair shake.
Both things can be true at once. A botched local probe does not require replacing it with a prosecutor whose defining public brand is political combat with the president. New York’s voters already know that record. The Cornell defendants are about to live with it.
Fair process is not optional, and handing a campus rape probe to Letitia James after her years-long war with Trump tells every defendant exactly whose interests come first.
