A former New York prosecutor claims AG Letitia James forced a Trump probe to continue after investigators found no wrongdoing, then fired him for speaking out.
Daniel Wiesenfeld says he spent a full year digging into an insider-trading tip aimed at a company tied to the Trump family and came up empty. His bureau chief agreed the case should die. Yet the order from the top, he says, was to keep going anyway.
Wiesenfeld, a prosecutor in the Investor Protection Bureau of the New York attorney general’s office, laid out the claim in a Wednesday interview and in internal emails. He says the pressure came because Attorney General Letitia James wanted it. After he told more than 2,000 colleagues what was happening, the office suspended him and later fired him.
A spokesperson for James says he was terminated for cause after violating the law, the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, or agency policy. Wiesenfeld calls that payback for refusing to bury evidence of a politically driven chase.
Wiesenfeld was assigned to chase an insider-trading claim built on a “cryptic text” tip that was never shared with him. He and others on the matter worked the file for a year and found no evidence of a crime.
By June 2026, after several meetings, the frustration boiled over. In his account to The Post, the bureau chief herself saw the same dead end.
Wiesenfeld put it this way:
“By June 2026, after several meetings, we had become exasperated,”
He said Bureau Chief Shamiso Maswoswe told the team, in sum and substance, that she agreed and would close the file if the decision were hers alone. It was not.
“Shamiso told us, in sum and substance, that she agreed with us and that if it were her call, she would close the case, but that it was Tish’s call.”
The bottom line, according to Wiesenfeld, was simple power politics inside the office.
“Tish was the boss and what Tish wanted, Tish got,”
“So we had to keep going.”
In August, Wiesenfeld was already at odds with his bosses. He blasted an email to more than 2,000 colleagues claiming he was being forced to find dirt on President Trump and his associates. The Times-Union obtained a copy and made it public. Controversy followed. The office suspended him, then terminated him.
That sequence fits a larger pattern of fairness fights around James’s office, including cases where defense lawyers have pressed her to step aside. One recent example is the push for recusal in the Cornell assault probe after Facebook posts.
Wiesenfeld told The Post the timing of his performance trouble was no accident. Negative feedback arrived only after he voiced his frustration with the open-ended Trump-related assignment. Before that, he says, his evaluation was strong.
“The negative feedback about my performance came only after I expressed that frustration,”
“Before then, I had received a very positive performance evaluation. So, the suggestion that I had simply been a problem employee all along is false.”
Earlier this week, The Post obtained an exchange of emails under New York’s Freedom of Information law. In it, Wiesenfeld pushed back hard against demands from the attorney general’s office. The office treated the materials as “confidential and privileged information.” He rejected that label and refused to destroy what he called evidence of the alleged corruption inside the probe.
His reply left little room for negotiation:
“These documents are simply evidence and your threats will not compel me to destroy such evidence,”
“If anything, carrying out your threats by bringing this to a legal forum will make this information public.”
Those same fairness questions have surfaced elsewhere. Critics have already argued that James cannot give an even-handed process in the Cornell fraternity cases Trump flagged as stacked against the accused.
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office framed the termination as standard enforcement of the rules. The office is bound to act, the spokesperson said, “when one of its attorneys violates the law, the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, or agency policy.”
The same statement added: “Mr. Wiesenfeld was terminated for cause after it was determined that he committed such violations.” And it closed with a broader defense: “We remain committed to enforcing New York’s laws and defending the rights of all New Yorkers. Any suggestion otherwise is disingenuous.”
The office has not publicly detailed which specific rule, statute, or policy it says Wiesenfeld broke. It has not released the tip text that launched the insider-trading assignment, the name of the Trump-family-affiliated company, or any official finding that the year-long probe ever uncovered a crime.
Wiesenfeld’s account leaves the core dispute in plain view. Career prosecutors saw no case. Their chief said she would close it. The attorney general’s preference, he says, overrode both. When he put that claim in writing to the entire office and refused to erase the paper trail, he lost his job.
New Yorkers have watched this attorney general take on high-profile political adversaries before. The same office that kept an empty Trump-related file open has also been handed other charged matters by Albany. Governor Kathy Hochul moved a sensitive campus case to James after losing confidence in the local district attorney, a transfer detailed when Hochul handed the Cornell fraternity rape probe to Letitia James.
Defense counsel in that matter have separately urged her to step away over public comments about the accuser, another chapter in the running debate over whether her office can separate politics from prosecution. Similar concerns appear in coverage of the lawyer who urged James to recuse from the Cornell 7 probe after Facebook comments.
None of those separate cases prove Wiesenfeld’s specific charge. They do show why a whistleblower’s claim that “what Tish wanted, Tish got” lands with force among taxpayers who expect the state’s top lawyer to follow evidence, not political demand.
The public still lacks the cryptic tip, the full August email text, the exact performance evaluations, and the precise rule the office says justified firing a prosecutor who refused to delete records. What is on the record is a year of work that found no crime, a bureau chief ready to close the file, an order to continue, a mass email, a document fight, a suspension, and a for-cause termination.
When investigators find nothing and the boss still wants a case, the public is entitled to ask whose interest the law is serving.
