FBI opens criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud, including falsifying her Virginia residence and claiming to be her father's wife in 1983. While James dismisses the probe as a "revenge tour" for prosecuting Donald Trump, host Trish Regan contrasts these claims with Trump's Mar-a-Lago case, citing Mike Davis's threat of prison for "lawfare." The episode also notes an FCC warning to Disney CEO Bob Iger regarding DEI discrimination and reports a $2.2 billion loss on linear TV assets, framing James as a "total crook" whose downfall validates federal enforcement over state power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, Qwen/Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Mortgage Fraud Allegations00:10:55
That day is finally here.
What did we tell you?
You've got to turn into the Trish Regan show.
I predicted this would come.
I didn't think it would happen this week, necessarily today.
We were just talking about Letitia James yesterday.
And of course, what Donald Trump was saying about how Pam Bondi was going to be looking into this.
And what do you know?
Today, ladies and gentlemen, we're in a situation where Letitia James now finds herself the subject of none other than a criminal investigation by the FBI.
We're going to get all into that.
Plus, Disney lost some $2.2 billion on its linear TV assets business.
Why doesn't that surprise me?
We're going to talk about Disney and all the pain it's feeling alongside a new FCC warning from Brendan Carr to Bob Iger.
And great news on Wall Street.
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Oh, my goodness gracious, Leticia James is, Oh is is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
I repeat, Leticia James is now the subject of a criminal investigation.
The EFF FBI, Kash Patel has opened one.
Wow.
And this is all related to the mortgage fraud allegations, which are quite serious.
New York Post reporting this first.
You've got to hand it to them.
They get great, great titles.
Tish in Troubled Waters.
They write FBI opens formal criminal probe into New York Attorney General Letitia James over alleged mortgage fraud.
Wow.
Look, we knew this would happen, right?
Eventually, we didn't necessarily know that she had all this.
alleged mortgage fraud, which by the way gets really weird.
I've got to show you the documentation in which she's saying that she's the wife of her father.
I've said before, like, we're getting into Ilhan Omar territory on that one.
Anyway, you know, the brother, allegations, of course.
Anyway, this is kind of a big deal, the actual allegations that they're making.
But first, I just want to remind you that she didn't have a prayer, right?
Because she was setting herself up for all kinds of trouble.
She just wants to be an obstacle for this administration.
And as I've said before, you know, this is Fed versus State.
And look, there's obviously a system that's set up so that we value states.
But when it comes to some issues like federal dollars, federal money, federal enforcement of the border, I'm sorry, Tish James, you are out of your league and the Constitution says it.
But we don't even have to go there right now.
They're finding her on simple mortgage delegation fraud.
Think about the irony of that given what she was going after Donald Trump for, right?
Remember, this is a very different team.
Mike Davis, one of the former attorneys.
To Donald Trump.
He said this a couple of months ago.
I haven't played it for a bit for you on Benny's show, but I just love it.
I mean, I could say it, but he says it was such panache that we might as well play it, right?
Different crew.
Let me just say this to Big Tish James, the New York Attorney General.
I dare you.
I dare you to try to continue your lawfare against President Trump in his second term because, listen here, sweetheart, we're not messing around this time and we will put your Fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights.
And I promise you that.
So think long and hard before you want to violate President Trump's constitutional rights or any other American's constitutional rights.
It's not going to happen again.
I just love that, okay?
We're going to put your fat, you know what, your fat tushy in the slammer because you are in violation of federal law.
Anyway, in all seriousness, they don't even have to go into the fact that she was extremely egregious and way out over her skis.
in terms of going after Donald Trump, which by the way they should.
You know, Elise Stefanik had requested that the New York Bar Association look into revoking her law license back then because she was overextending her power, something that even the judges at the appellate court brought up.
But we don't even have to go there right now because they're going to run this.
They're going to run something pretty simple.
According to William Pultey, who oversees basically all these federal loans, he's alleging that basically she said that her principal residence was in Norfolk.
Virginia when she was applying for a federal housing loan.
So this is federal taxpayer dollars.
This is like so other level than what she was going after Donald Trump for, for which he has nearly a 500 million, sorry, now with interest it's over 500 million, half a billion dollars, right, that he's still racking up charges on there in the state of New York.
But what's crazy here is that she was actually trying to take advantage of federal loan money.
And she said, while she was AG of the state of New York, she said that she lived in Virginia and she intended to make that her primary residence.
So this is a document they have.
And that's kind of like, whoa, why would you do that other than you wanted to get a better rate?
Because you see, the federal government loans, they really don't like it when you have a second home.
The idea is that you have one home and then they know you're committed to that and they kind of will give you a better rate on the first home because once you get into the second, it gets a little bit more dicey.
So here we go.
Pulte's accusations stem from that when she purchased her niece, Charmice Thompson's home in 2023 after securing a $219,780 mortgage as her, quote, principal residence, That was actually in violation of the law, because she was, at the time, serving as New York's top cop, the state AG.
Has to live obviously, in the state of New York while in office, but that document that she signed cited power of attorney papers from 2023, signed by the AG, authorizing the purchase of the property in which she attested, quote, I hereby declare to intend to occupy this property as my principal residence.
Now her lawyer's like, oh gosh, you know nothing to see here.
This was just an oversight, a clerical error, nothing to worry about.
I mean, she signed it.
I hereby declare to intend to occupy this property as my principal resident.
You think you do that kind of thing?
If you're living in, I mean, you think I would, I live in the New York area.
If I go and buy a vacation home in the state of New Hampshire and intend to stall one of my family members in it, you think that I'm going to say I intend to live here?
That's like, that's kind of a no-no.
I mean, and for goodness sakes, the woman's a lawyer, right?
Okay.
Oh, here's the other goodie.
So this is back, you're going to go all the way back to 1983, but I don't care.
So what?
We'll go all the way back as far as we have.
Go back, ladies and gentlemen, 1983.
Look at this, Leticia James signing a document to buy a house, with her father listing herself signing the document herself as her father's wife.
You see, because she was just out of school and she was apparently earning a salary and he wasn't, so she needed to somehow help him get the place.
So therefore, now she becomes his wife, right like this is messed up.
These are people who don't actually respect the law.
I mean, we knew she didn't respect the law, given what she had done to Donald Trump, but this is like whole other level stuff.
Okay, let's go to.
You know who's doing some great reporting on this?
The Times Union.
So they laid it all out.
They talk about that.
1983 purchase of the queen's residence with her dad and lol, the lawyer that, by the way, Us No, forgive me, New York, New York taxpayers are paying for, Because she's saying this is not a personal matter.
This is a state matter.
I have to have the state pay for my attorney.
So she hires Abby Lowell, who then attributes these documents, you know, in which they say that she is her father's wife.
It's just another clerical error made by someone else.
Quote, he asked his daughter, then a few years out of school, to help him by allowing him to add her name to the mortgage application.
Mr. James filled out the mortgage material wherein he described their relationship as being spouses.
Oh, I see.
I'm going to blame daddy.
Just blame daddy.
Throw him under the bus, Letitia.
Yeah, lovely lady that you are.
Okay, described their relationship as being, quote, spouses and purchased the home without his daughter's involvement.
However, James, who was then 24 years old and a college graduate, did sign the notarized mortgage herself, along with her father.
And on one of the document, on all those pages, she's listed as her father's wife.
So are we just supposed to say, oh, she didn't know as she's signing a notarized document, a lawyer that she is, that she signed on as daddy's wife?
Come on.
Oh, this woman's going down.
She's going down.
And it's going to be quite interesting to see.
This is the house, by the way, in Norfolk, Virginia, where she claimed that she was going to live full time.
She claimed that this was going to be her.
full-time residents, this courtesy of the New York Post, despite serving as attorney general in New York.
Well, that's kind of a problem, right?
And Pulte points out exactly what I was just telling you, that actually the reason why some people might choose to do that, although it's fraudulent, it's like criminally fraudulent to do, the reason she may have done that is because, quote, primary residence mortgages receive more favorable loan terms, including lower mortgage rates, than secondary residence mortgages.
Lenders view secondary residence mortgages as significant.
significantly riskier as a borrower is more likely to continue paying off a primary residence mortgage during any kind of financial hardship.
So wow, it's just the sweet irony of this given what she went after Donald Trump for.
I mean, think about that.
Here she was going after him for a quote-unquote mortgage fraud because he got a preferable rate because he told them that he believed his property, Mar-a-Lago, was worth X.
And she's like, no, no, no, no, it's only worth Y.
I mean, she wanted it to be worth something like $18 million.
Irony of the Ethics Complaint00:11:32
Give me a break.
I mean, the dirt is worth more than $18 million, for goodness sakes.
The property, because he made income off of it, was making something like $56 million a year.
So the earnings stream alone, I mean, you got to take a multiple of that, Letitia, and on top of it, you find me that kind of acreage on the ocean in Palm Beach on that stretch for $18 million.
And I'll tell you, honey, I'll buy it all day long.
You know what?
I'll buy 10 of them.
We'll get a big group of investors together because that's the kind of deal you want.
No, there's no way it was worth that.
So how is Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, trying to determine the valuation on Mar-a-Lago, a property that, by the way, is a private transaction between Deutsche Bank and Donald Trump?
It was honestly, I got to tell you guys, maybe it's because I'm a business reporter and I kind of eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff.
Of all the lawsuits, that was the most offensive to me.
That was the most disgusting, most egregious, and most dangerous from the standpoint of who the heck wants to do any business in the state of New York because you could have a Leticia James breathing down your back any second just because she doesn't like your politics or she considers you a threat.
And that, that, my friends, is what we need to get rid of.
We don't need people like that in our system that are going to threaten everything and prevent other good people from going into politics.
I'm worked up.
I'm angry.
I'm disgusted.
I'm disgusted that this woman has any position at all.
And I hope to God that Kash Patel and his entire team take her down because she doesn't deserve it.
She doesn't deserve this job.
She should not be part of our system.
Here is the brownstone in Brooklyn.
Okay, again, another opportunity to score a better rate.
Why?
because she said there were four dwellings when there were actually five.
And because she was getting a kind of public assistance type of loan of some sort, you couldn't have five dwellings.
You needed to make it four.
And so she fudged the numbers on that as well.
Now, these again are all allegations.
They do have the paperwork.
You've seen some of it.
But she's like, no, nothing to see here.
I will not be proven wrong.
There will be no investigation, et cetera.
Huh?
Funny.
Today they just announced one, Letitia.
So you're going to have to eat your words on this.
I will respond to these baseless allegations at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way.
But I am 100% confident, confident that it will not result in any criminal indictment or action against me and that it is nothing more than a revenge tour and that Donald Trump just ultimately got to the J's and I was next.
The key allegation, again, it sounds like you don't want to address them here, but I'm just going to put it out so people understand that a property that was owned in Virginia and a mortgage that you signed, if I'm not mistaken, for that property, that they say you falsely represented yourself as a resident of Virginia and that that was essentially amounts to mortgage fraud since you're a resident of New York.
What is your response to that?
It's baseless.
Everybody knows I'm a resident of New York.
specifically Brooklyn.
And again, we will respond at the appropriate time in the appropriate way to these baseless allegations.
And some media outlets like the Daily News over the weekend has indicated as much.
Okay.
That's all you want to say.
That's all that I'm going to say.
And you know what?
He's not going to ask her for anything else because he's a member of the cabal that is the left-wing media.
That was Chris Hayes, you know, the one that's like the carbon clone of Rachel Maddow.
Like you can't really tell them apart except one's a boy and one's a girl, we think.
So she goes on his show and she's like, oh, you know, no problems, no problems.
Well, Kosh Patel thinks there's a problem.
And guess what?
Pam Bondi, I'm guessing, is going to think there's a problem as well.
She has to be careful here because the DOJ is supposed to have some independence, obviously, from the administration.
But how can you ignore this one?
How can you ignore mortgage fraud?
Like big mortgage fraud, not like what was being alleged by the likes of Letitia James.
No, this is big stuff.
Here's Donald Trump talking about what he expected.
Oh, and by the way, what an awful, lousy person Letitia James is to begin with.
I can say unrelated to that.
She's a disaster for New York.
She's a horrible, horrible human being.
And I think she's a total crook.
There's no question about it.
But that's just my opinion.
Pam's going to have to do what she wants.
She's a very bad person.
She's a very, very, a very bad person who campaigned solely on I'm going to get Donald Trump over and over again.
She's a sick person.
But that has nothing to do with what Pam does.
Pam is going to do what's right.
She always does.
I've known her a long time.
Well, I guess in this particular case, doing what's right is following through.
So since Cash has made the initiative to launch a criminal investigation into one Letitia James, my expectation is that if the goods are delivered to Pam, she will follow through.
She will follow through.
She's just hearing about it just the other day as this news was breaking.
Remember on the mortgage fraud, again, she's trying to walk a tight line.
She said she appreciates that somebody went and did all the due diligence to go all the way back to 1983 with the father thing because they're going to have some material to work with.
James tried to prosecute the now president, Trump, in his second term.
I just want to read a couple things, criminal referral, then a response from James's office here.
In New York.
James, for both properties listed above, this deals with real estate now, going back decades really, appears to have falsified records in order to meet certain lending requirements and receive favorable loan terms.
All right.
Her office responded by saying the AG James is focused every single day on protecting New Yorkers.
Specialist administration weaponizes the federal government against the rule of law and the Constitution.
She will not be intimidated by bullies, no matter who they are.
The issue here is what property she owned and whether or not she owned it, whether or not she was married, and whether or not her father was involved in all this.
Without going into the weeds of the details, this stems from a case in 1983 and the year 2000.
That's a minimum of 25 years.
Someone had to do some digging to find this.
Am I right about that?
Yeah.
Bill, the most I know about the case, I just learned from you.
I saw it on Breaking News this morning.
This case was sent to us from Bill Pulte.
We have not seen it.
I inquired right before I walked out here, and no one in my office has read it yet.
We haven't looked at it.
Of course, we'll be reviewing it.
You just told me more than I've heard about it so far.
Hey, we aim to please with some breaking news of our own.
Indeed.
All right.
Attorney General Pam Bondi.
That was good, right?
Anyway, at this point in time, you've got to assume that the New York Bar Association is going to consider this ethics complaint against Letitia more seriously.
Now, given the partisan nature of everything, perhaps they're saying, well, let's wait and just see what Kash Patel actually comes up with.
But don't forget what happened out in the state of Wisconsin.
You had that Milwaukee judge, remember?
Judge Dugan, who somehow thought it was okay to escort a man who was allegedly a domestic violence criminal.
Like, that's what he was being accused of and was here illegally.
ICE was waiting by the sidelines.
She escorted him into her chambers and let him out the back door.
So the FBI arrested her because, you know, you can't really do that.
Like, you're a judge, okay?
These things are sort of obvious to most of us in this world.
So the FBI arrested her and what happened?
The Supreme Court of the state of Wisconsin announced that she was suspended from her duties.
So one would think in a situation like this, the law committee, the bar association, somebody in the state of New York ought to be relieving Letitia James of her duties and frankly her law license, but perhaps they'll wait until there's a little bit more proof.
Don't forget the history of this, guys.
How litigious this woman, Letitia, was, how much she wanted to take him down.
I mean, the word on the street was she was just waiting, chomping at the bit to be able to go in there and take over Trump Tower.
Don't forget this, what she did.
Four days after a judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $355 million for a decade of fraud, New York Attorney General Letitia James says she's prepared to do everything she can to make sure the former president pays his fine, including, she told us, seizing the buildings that bear his name.
If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek, you know, judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets.
All right.
Well, maybe now they're going to be seizing yours, Tish.
And maybe you're going to be going to prison.
No wonder you were so freaking out the other day.
And you want me to sit in my seat and stand idly by and allow this craziness to happen?
You can come after me if you want.
But you elected me to stand up.
You elected me to use the law.
You elected me to go to court.
You elected me to continue to challenge this administration.
You elected me to stand up for the least of God's children.
You elected me to continue fighting on.
And I will fight on.
Boom.
Except you may be in jail.
And the New York bar is going to strip you of your law license, I would expect.
You know, you deserve that one.
Especially the way you lied, the way you campaigned.
You campaigned on going after Trump, for goodness sakes.
I was so sick of this, right?
And then.
Lied through her teeth trying to say, Well, that wasn't me.
I didn't do that.
No way, Jose.
The president of the United States has complained that I'm engaging in some sort of political witch hunt, that I've got some personal vendetta against him, that I campaigned against him.
That is not true.
This illegitimate president who sits in the White House.
That president, because he's not my president, he's an illegitimate president.
His days are numbered.
His days are numbered.
No, actually, I think your days are numbered.
Leticia James, you are now officially.
The subjects are an investigation by the FBI and all of the mortgage fraud activities that you allegedly did take place in, those are now under scrutiny in enormous ways.
So while you tried to go after Donald Trump, but this takes one to no one, right?
We were like, what the heck is this that she's coming up with?
It was so preposterous and so bizarre and there was no victim and whatever.
I mean, in her case, there really were victims, right?
Because she was using like federal guarantees.
This was the Federal Housing Authority that has come up with this one.
Whole other ballgame.
And Letitia, honey, baby, you're going down.
Mark my words.
Letitia James Is Going Down00:03:11
It's kind of good, right?
We're going to get to the Pope.
We got lots going on.
Disney as well.
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Patriot Mobile Coverage Guarantee00:03:11
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Oh Disney Wow Disney's getting a whole new warning from the FCC Brandon car's not messing around.
He just came out and he said it on live television Boy, I if I'm Bob Iger right now I am like you know what my pants because this company like I'm sorry.
I think they're sort of finished.
I mean, we haven't even talked about their earnings.
They lost $2.2 billion over at the streaming television entity that includes ABC.
But let's listen to Brendan Carr because Brendan Carr is putting it out there.
He went on to CNBC and this story somehow just didn't make any news except for here, right?
That's probably why we get 700 and nearly 40,000 subs and growing.
And that's why we're getting such a big tune in because there's all these stories that the mainstream media doesn't care about and they don't bother with.
And ABC is one of them.
They're going down.
They're all protecting their friends.
That's the problem.
But Brendan is making it very clear.
I want you to watch this clip from CNBC.
The other issue that you've gone after is the DEI policy, specifically a really sharply worded note to Bob Iger on Disney.
What is the status of those investigations, and how are you even going about doing them?
Yeah, the first thing we did, basically day one after President Trump came in, he issued an executive order to end the federal government's promotion of DEI.
We did that at the FCC.
I mean, you'd be shocked.
We were spending millions and millions of dollars at the FCC promoting DEI.
In fact, it was listed as the agency's number two.
Budget priority and strategic priority.
We've ended that to focus on our core mission.
We've told everybody that's trying to do deals before the FCC that they need to end their own promotion of NVIDIA's forms of DEI.
Disney and ABC in particular are ones I'm very concerned about.
The preliminary data indicates that they look like they were doing intentional discrimination, potentially, along race and gender.
And if that's true, that's a really big deal.
And so we're looking at that at the FCC.
And what sort of consequences would you be looking at that?
Well, again, it's the full suite of consequences that the FCC could potentially have.
So we're going to look at that.
But again, the media stuff gets a lot of attention.
Particularly by the media because it involves the media.
But our traditional economic agenda is what we're really pushing hard on as well.
And that's the deregulation effort.
Look, we've got to get more spectrum out there.
If you remember the first Trump administration, we got tons of airwaves out there.
It helped bolster our leadership in 5G.
During the Biden years, we really fell behind.
So right now, we have to get at least 600 megahertz of spectrum out there.
Particularly when you look at AI, that's loading tons of new data onto our networks.
We need more spectrum to carry that capacity.
That's one of the most important things we're doing.
Okay, but not done with the Disney thing.
One more question, which is, will you evaluate it?
Differently for companies like Disney who have said that they're going to roll back some of these DEI initiatives.
Bob Iger was pretty plain where he said, Our business is to be in the entertainment, not comment on social issues.
Does that matter?
Yeah, I think it's a good thing that they're heading in the right direction.
I guess, one, we want to make sure that it's in substance, not in name only.
And second of all, we've got to look at the conduct that took place in the past, that they were sort of intentionally discriminating on race and gender.
That's a potential problem under the FCC's own EEO rules.
It could be a problem under the EEOC commission.
So we're looking at that.
So it's just going from bad to worse.
FCC Spectrum and DEI Rules00:01:04
Okay.
Like you can't make this up.
This is Bob Iger's worst nightmare.
And I kind of think it's sort of funny because don't forget, Bob Iger was the first one to pull that funding.
Remember from Twitter when Elon Musk came in and bought it and Elon was really, really ticked.
He's like, F you, Bob.
I hope this doesn't actually have the obscenity in it because we're not supposed to play those, but let's see.
We're going to roll the dice.
It was advertisers leaving.
We talked to Bob Eigenstein.
I hope they stop.
You hope?
Don't advertise.
You don't want them to advertise?
No.
What do you mean?
If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f yourself.