A prosecutor inside New York Attorney General Letitia James' own office accused his supervisor of directing staff to "find and pursue crimes" tied to Donald Trump, and the email he sent to thousands of colleagues was wiped from agency servers.
Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, a member of the Investor Protection Bureau within James' office, sent the agency-wide message on a Friday, alleging that bureau chief Shamiso Maswoswe had instructed him to investigate Trump, his social media platform Truth Social, and Hewlett Packard without first establishing a credible legal basis for doing so. Fox News Digital reported that the email reached employees across the office before it vanished from inboxes, removed, Wiesenfeld alleged, from the office's servers entirely.
The allegation strikes at one of the most persistent criticisms of James' tenure: that her office has operated less as a neutral law-enforcement body and more as a political instrument aimed at one man and his allies. Wiesenfeld's decision to go public, and the speed with which his message disappeared, has now drawn federal investigators into the matter.
Wiesenfeld's message went to roughly 2,000 staffers, the Washington Examiner reported, making the accusation impossible to contain internally. In the email, he urged colleagues not to act as the attorney general's "personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies." He alleged that Maswoswe had pushed him to pursue investigations of specific Trump-affiliated individuals and organizations without the kind of credible predicate that normally precedes a state enforcement action.
Shortly after the email circulated, Kumiki Gibson, James' general counsel, sent a follow-up message to staff characterizing the situation as an "internal" matter and assuring employees they were not "in danger." The reassurance itself raised questions: if the original email was merely a disgruntled employee's complaint, why would the general counsel need to tell 2,000 people they were safe?
Wiesenfeld was placed on paid administrative leave, the New York Post reported. James' office dismissed the entire episode as a personnel matter.
A spokesperson for the attorney general's office told reporters: "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."
That denial sits uneasily next to the timeline. An employee made a specific, written allegation of politically motivated prosecution. The written evidence was deleted from agency systems. The employee was removed from his post. And the office's only public response was to call it a staffing issue. James' office has faced similar accusations of political targeting from within its own ranks, accusations that keep piling up.
The matter did not stay inside Albany. FBI agents and attorneys from the Justice Department's criminal and civil divisions sat down with Wiesenfeld for what sources described as a meeting lasting several hours. The session covered his claims that Maswoswe directed him to pursue Trump-linked targets without legitimate investigative grounds.
Wiesenfeld drew a pointed comparison in his leaked email. "If you believe Trump is using the DOJ attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests," he wrote, "you should find it equally troubling that Tish James is doing exactly the same thing."
That line frames the allegation in terms even James' defenders would struggle to dismiss outright. For years, progressive prosecutors have warned about the dangers of a politicized Justice Department. Wiesenfeld's accusation turns that same principle inward, aimed at a state attorney general who built her political brand on investigating one political figure. Federal prosecutors have now taken that accusation seriously enough to interview him at length.
The supervisor at the center of Wiesenfeld's allegations carries her own complicated record with federal law enforcement. Shamiso Maswoswe worked as a trial attorney in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section from January 2016 until December 2017, when she was terminated during Trump's first term.
In February 2021, Maswoswe filed a discrimination lawsuit against the DOJ, alleging she had been unfairly fired because of her race, she is of Zimbabwean descent, and because of scrutiny over her pregnancy, breastfeeding, and caregiving responsibilities. She sought reinstatement, back pay, and damages.
Two years later, in 2023, the DOJ settled the case for $795,000. But the settlement agreement was explicit: the payment was a compromise of disputed claims, not an admission that discrimination or retaliation had occurred. The DOJ expressly denied Maswoswe's allegations.
Maswoswe joined James' office in February 2022, one year before she collected that settlement, and rose to lead the Investor Protection Bureau. Newsmax noted that Wiesenfeld specifically accused her of directing the bureau's resources toward "convenient public enemies" rather than crimes affecting ordinary New Yorkers.
None of this proves Maswoswe acted out of personal grievance against the Trump administration that fired her. But the sequence, termination, lawsuit, settlement, hiring by James, and then an allegation that she ordered staff to target Trump, is the kind of pattern that invites hard questions. Those questions now sit with federal investigators.
The whistleblower allegations land against a well-documented backdrop. Letitia James campaigned openly on investigating Trump's business practices before she took office. In 2022, she launched a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump and the Trump Organization that initially produced more than $450 million in penalties.
An appeals court later upheld Trump's liability in the case but voided the financial penalty, a result that left the legal outcome in limbo while confirming that the case itself had been built on contested ground. Trump's legal team has challenged the fraud case in New York's highest court, calling the prosecution unprecedented and politically driven.
Wiesenfeld's email, if his account is accurate, suggests the targeting went beyond the fraud case. He named Truth Social, Trump's social media company, and Hewlett Packard, which he described in connection with a DOJ-approved merger, as additional entities Maswoswe allegedly told him to investigate. Just The News reported that the alleged instruction came without credible justification for any of the targets.
The White House did not hold back. Spokesperson Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital:
"This is more proof of the weaponization of the justice system by Letitia James to target President Trump and her political opponents. The far-left Democrats lawfare against President Trump, his family, and allies must stop."
James' office wants this treated as an internal dispute with a single employee. But the facts already outrun that framing. The email went to 2,000 people. It was scrubbed from agency servers. The employee who sent it was sidelined. And federal law enforcement has now invested hours interviewing him about what he saw.
Meanwhile, James' office faces pressure on other fronts. Federal officials have separately frozen funding for New York's Medicaid fraud enforcement unit, citing a collapse in criminal enforcement under her watch. The picture that emerges is of an attorney general's office that has poured resources into high-profile political targets while letting core enforcement obligations slip.
Several questions remain unanswered. Maswoswe has not responded publicly to Wiesenfeld's allegations. The exact contents of his email, beyond the paraphrased excerpts that have surfaced, have not been released in full. And no one has explained who ordered the email deleted or how it was removed from the inboxes of thousands of employees.
Prosecutors are supposed to follow evidence to wherever it leads, not pick a target and hunt for a crime. When a state attorney general's own employee says that principle was violated, and federal investigators find the claim worth examining, "personnel matter" stops being a satisfactory answer.
