(The Epoch Times)—New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a federal judge in Virginia on Nov. 7 to dismiss a mortgage fraud case against her that she says is a case of selective prosecution.
James, who entered not-guilty pleas to charges of mortgage fraud in Norfolk, Virginia, on Oct. 24, alleges the Trump administration targeted her after she brought a civil action against President Donald Trump for bank fraud in New York. Her trial is scheduled for Jan. 26, 2026.
James is accused of one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution, after she said on mortgage documents that a house she purchased in Norfolk would be used as a secondary residence.
The U.S. Department of Justice claims that she instead used that home as a rental property for a family of three. Designating the property as a second home instead of a rental property allowed James to save nearly $19,000 in interest and tax credits, the government alleges.
If convicted, she could be sentenced to as many as 30 years in prison and fined $1 million for each count.
James was elected in 2018 after running on a campaign promise to investigate Trump. In September 2022, she filed a lawsuit against Trump, alleging he had overvalued his real estate holdings by billions of dollars.
James stated in the motion that she had brought a lawsuit against Trump, two of his children, and the Trump Organization, which resulted in a court finding in 2024 that they were liable for fraud.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ruled against Trump in February 2024, issuing a judgment of more than $460 million, with interest accruing.
The New York Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, a branch of the New York Supreme Court, tossed the penalty in August in a fractured ruling but left the finding of fraud against Trump undisturbed.
James filed an appeal on Sept. 4 of the ruling throwing out the financial penalty.
In the motion filed on Nov. 7 with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, James said the court should throw out the indictment against her because the federal government “targeted [her] for prosecution because of the President’s genuine animus towards her protected campaign speech and fulfillment of her statutory obligations as New York Attorney General.”
The indictment is “the product of vindictive and selective prosecution, in violation of the Fifth Amendment,” the motion said. “Because this prosecution is flagrantly unconstitutional, this Court should dismiss the indictment with prejudice.”
If a case is dismissed with prejudice, the government is not allowed to refile the case in the same court.
The motion said that the lawsuit against Trump, coupled with James’s “outspoken criticism of the President, triggered six years of targeted attacks.” Trump, along with his allies, “have used every insulting term in their vocabulary to deride AG James and call for criminal penalties in retaliation for the exercise of her rights and fulfillment of her statutory duties to fulfill her obligations as New York state’s attorney general,” it said.
Since his return to the presidency, Trump and “his hand-picked Department of Justice officials exhausted every avenue to secure the payback that the President demanded,” the filing said.
James claimed that despite lengthy efforts, federal officials “could not support a criminal charge” and “that did not sit well with the President,” so Trump removed the interim U.S. attorney and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, giving her “the singular mission of churning out indictments against his political enemies,” the motion said.
James said she has presented “substantial, clear evidence that she was chosen for prosecution” because she exercised her rights as New York attorney general.
The court should dismiss the indictment with prejudice “to preserve the foundational tenets of due process and equal protection under the law,” the motion said.
James filed a separate motion on Oct. 24 to dismiss the indictment, arguing that Halligan was unlawfully appointed and therefore had no legal authority to file charges.
Halligan “lacked the power to present this case to the grand jury or sign this indictment, and she cannot continue to supervise this prosecution,” the motion said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the Department of Justice for comment. No reply was received by publication time.
Stacy Robinson contributed to this report.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
