New York Attorney General Letitia James faces mounting pressure as Siena College polls reveal a 60% unfavorable rating, contrasting sharply with Donald Trump's strong support in Western New York. Critics highlight her alleged mortgage fraud under 18 USC 1014, which could yield a 30-year sentence, and claim she lacks $10 million to pay legal fees for lawyers like Abby Lowell. With potential asset liquidation looming and a disconnect from the broader electorate, James struggles against GOP accusations of financial vulnerability while aggressively pursuing Trump's $355 million fraud judgment. Ultimately, these vulnerabilities suggest her political future in New York is precarious amidst deepening internal state divisions. [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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New York Voter Backlash00:06:16
You're going to have the state of New York, for example, sit there and say, Sanctuary City, we're going to help all the legal migrants.
We're going to take your taxpayer dollars and we're going to use it to fight these battles in court.
And you know who's not liking this?
Voters.
I mean, don't forget, guys, Donald Trump was elected for a reason.
He was elected actually for two reasons.
One was immigration, and the other was the economy.
And so, looking at his track record, so far, so good, right?
You talk about winning.
What a week.
I mean, last night we got news of the China trade deal that's happening.
And now today, this one on the heels of what happened with Iran, we're talking winning, winning, winning, winning.
I'm like, I can't keep up.
I was joking that as I was coming to air and it took us a little longer because the news was coming in and out of Canada with the tariffs, et cetera.
And of course, the Supreme Court stuff and the interpretation of all of this.
I'm like, we got to get on the air because who knows what's coming next, right?
Like, it's boom, boom, boom.
And it's amazing to see.
I mean, truly, I can tell you, like, I've been a journalist for a long time, I've never seen anything like this.
It is fast and furious, and he's got a lot of wins.
The sail, you know, the wind is right at the back of him right now, so he's sailing forward.
Letitia James, however, is not.
These are the most recent polls from Siena College, and you can see that Letitia James is looking really kind of dicey there.
She's looking 60 to 40.
I mean, unfavorable, and they don't know, versus favorable there in the state of New York.
The only people that like her are some of the lefties in New York City, you know, the ones that voted for the socialist communist guy who everybody's freaking out of right about now.
Senator Chuck Schumer.
He's pretty vulnerable too, as is Representative Hakeem Jeffries.
But you know, Letitia is actually more vulnerable than both of them because when you add all that up, 60% are not sure that they're going to vote for her.
So, again, I would just remind you that people voted for Donald Trump for a reason.
And New York City is very peculiar and very much its own little island, you know, Manhattan being the center of it.
And they have gone extremely left, extremely progressive.
We'll see what happens.
I actually think Eric Adams is going to have a really good shot there as mayor of New York City because this is just too much.
But Think about what's happening in the rest of the state.
So, the rest of the state is very different.
I know this, my husband's actually from the Buffalo area.
And so, we spent a lot of time there in Western New York.
And I'm like, wow, look at all the Trump signs.
They're like, they're everywhere, right?
And there's a lot of support for Donald Trump when you get outside of New York City.
Well, Letitia James is trying to throw her weight around, quite literally, in a lot of these places.
And she's now trying to probe local cops, including in Western New York.
Saying, hey, you know what, you're in trouble.
If you work with the Trump administration, if you work with ICE, you're going to be in trouble.
That doesn't sit well with the rest of the voters.
No, it doesn't.
And so this is why she's kind of losing her grip.
And I suspect she's got a real shot at getting voted out along with Kathy Hochul.
I mean, she's in the meantime got other problems, let's face it.
I mean, she's got real, real problems over the allegations of her mortgage situation.
And right now, I don't know if she's even going to have the money to be able to fight this.
The GOP is saying you don't have access to the $10 million.
This is really also a very bad thing for Letitia James vis a vis the voters because it doesn't sit well when they find out that you're using the $10 million of their taxpayer dollars to pay off your expensive lawyers like Abby Lowell, who represented. Hunter Biden, that doesn't work.
The voters are angry.
So I would just say, I don't know, you know, maybe at some point she might actually have to sell her stuff, maybe liquidate some of those assets.
A nice little house in Richmond, Virginia.
How much do you think that one's worth?
Norfolk, Virginia.
How much might that one be worth?
I wonder.
Anyway, she might have to actually liquidate some of her assets in order to pay for her expensive lawyers because.
The GOP is like, you're not going to have this $10 million.
And so it's funny.
Like, it's like poetic, right?
What goes around comes around.
Letitia, you know, maybe you should have thought a little more carefully through that mortgage application before you went after Donald Trump for something that clearly you must have a guilty conscience of.
I mean, if these allegations are true, woo.
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.
Poetic.
You get it, right?
Because you wonder if she's going to have to actually, nobody's going to be seizing her assets necessarily, at least not yet, but she's going to have to sell something.
Like I said, That Virginia place.
I'm not sure how much she's going to get.
Enough to pay for the legal bills?
I doubt it.
Anyway, if she can't, she's looking at what, 30 years, up to 30 years in prison?
Because she may have violated 18 USC 1014, giving false statements to obtain a federally insured loan.
18 USC 1001, false statements to the US government.
Ooh, Leticia, this is not looking good.
It's really, really not looking good.
You know, she's definitely got problems ahead.
So, she is not going to be able to fight everything the way that she had anticipated as a result of the Supreme Court's decision earlier today.
She's dealing with her own internal struggles there in New York, given that the rest of the state really has no use for her.
She is not on board with them.
Meanwhile, she's trying to use up all their money to pay for her legal bills while she simultaneously fights this thing, which is looking increasingly problematic as we scale back what's really going on with these allegations.
She says she's perfectly innocent.
It's just a typo.
We're like, okay, aren't you a lawyer?
Like, aren't you supposed to know better?
Maybe you should be held to a little bit of a higher standard.