Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is facing a criminal referral to the Department of Justice regarding a series of mortgage fraud charges brought forward by her own agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). In a multi-page complaint to the DOJ, the FHFA lays out a list of serious mortgage fraud crimes committed by Letitia James.
00:00:00.000Welcome back. We are back in the Stone Zone. The Federal Housing Finance Agency of the U.S.
00:00:07.060government has sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice regarding serial mortgage
00:00:14.000fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Remember her? She's the one who said
00:00:19.900no one is above the law. Well, evidently that applies to her as well. In a multi-page complaint
00:00:28.680to the Department of Justice, the head of the FHFA outlined a series of serious mortgage fraud
00:00:37.760crimes. These are largely based on the work of two investigators, Joel Gilbert, an investigative
00:00:45.560journalist and film producer, documentary film producer, who joins us today, and Sam Antar,
00:00:52.120who writes the lively whitecollarfraud.com site. And they have documented, both of them,
00:01:01.100all of their findings. Joel Gilbert has produced a number of documentary feature films. He has a new
00:01:06.760one out regarding my good friend, Roseanne Barr. We're going to ask him about that as well. But
00:01:11.980Joel Gilbert, welcome into the Stone Zone.
00:01:15.000Okay, thanks, Roger. Great to be back.
00:01:17.680So, the Gateway Pundit, where you have published 50 days of your Letitia files, in my view, have helped
00:01:26.100restore justice in this country. She, of course, denies any wrongdoing. She hired the lawyer, Abby Lowell,
00:01:35.060who last represented Hunter Biden, none too successfully, to deny everything. But the documents themselves
00:01:43.060don't lie. You have done Yeoman's job of exposing a number of the major scandals here. I believe it
00:01:52.020was you, Joel, who first discovered that James had received, back in 2011, a federally subsidized
00:01:59.540HAMP mortgage modification that required the property that you were getting a mortgage for to be
00:02:06.260no more than four residential units. Now, the official certificate of occupancy showed that the
00:02:13.760property in question had five, and then Sam Antar's investigation revealed critical last-minute
00:02:20.240handwritten notations in the mortgage document, including the words, quote, four FAM in one corner,
00:02:26.780and a contradictory note saying, quote, not more than six residential units, suggesting a deliberate
00:02:33.480manipulation to maintain technical eligibility while creating plausible deniability about the
00:02:39.940property's true status. If I did this, they would charge me. Tell me what you have discovered in your
00:02:47.040latest piece, because there's a new Letitia James scandal brewing here.
00:02:52.440Correct. In addition to the HAMP loan investigation, the one regarding the Norfolk property in Virginia,
00:02:58.880where she claimed to the lender that she would be a primary residence in order to get lower mortgage
00:03:05.460rates, I've taken a look at her estate filing in 1999. Her father died in 1986, Robert James,
00:03:15.140and it was three years after Letitia purchased a home with him, pretending to be his wife. They purchased
00:03:22.080a home in Queens, a small townhouse, and they applied for the mortgage as husband and wife. Now,
00:03:27.700I've written previously about how that was likely done because Letitia, 24 years old at the time,
00:03:33.020probably could not qualify for a loan and didn't have the income to do that. So that was in itself
00:03:39.320a form of mortgage fraud. You cannot misrepresent a relationship in order to get a mortgage.
00:03:44.800Now, her father dies in 1986. For some strange reason, I talk about this in my article today,
00:03:50.500it's very, very rare that a estate proceeding doesn't happen within a year or two of someone's
00:03:58.720death. But Letitia James waited 13 years, which is unheard of. I cite the fact that she didn't file
00:04:04.700any tax filings about her father's estate and that she asked the court to give her her father's interest
00:04:12.740in the townhome because she said that she could not inherit it unless the court gave her the tenancy
00:04:22.660and common rights. Now, really, she did have a joint tenancy because she applied for the mortgage as
00:04:29.140her father's wife. So she gets this grant from the probate court to give her, 13 years later,
00:04:37.400her father's interest in the townhome. Lo and behold, one year later in 2000, she sells the property
00:04:44.300as husband and wife that Robert James is her husband, even though he's deceased and even
00:04:50.200though she inherited it. So I looked at these discrepancies in this estate and I said, there's
00:04:55.740all kind of problems here. There's the delay, there's selling it as a husband and wife when you
00:05:01.760inherited it, the lack of any tax filings. And I'm saying that this 13-year difference and Letitia
00:05:10.780James' mishandling of her father's estate is kind of a bridge that shows how she was treating the law
00:05:18.220and treating her responsibilities as an attorney. And I believe she should be looked at. And the
00:05:24.420background of this, you might remember in 2016, Hillary Clinton introduced the term fake news into the
00:05:30.5802016 campaign. And Donald Trump quickly took over that line and used it against the left.
00:05:38.060I think the breathtaking hypocrisy is what's driving this interest because when Letitia James
00:05:44.180introduced the idea, no one is above the law, she's the one that apparently has behaved as though
00:05:49.580she's been above the law in all of her real estate transactions for 40 years. As I recall, the actual
00:05:56.120title on that property correctly records it as belonging to father and daughter while the mortgage
00:06:02.100records the mortgage having been given to husband and wife. Perfect example of fraud. If all three
00:06:11.620mortgages are considered, James is claiming $509,600 in mortgage debt on one Virginia property assessed at
00:06:20.440just $187,300, a loan to value ratio of 272%, far beyond any rational underwriting standard and likely
00:06:33.080impossible to obtain through legitimate lending channels. Now, Letitia claims two Fridays ago, I think it was,
00:06:42.700is that when you and Sam Antar at whitecollarfraud.com visited her apartment building to confirm the number of units there and that she had, in fact, committed fraud. She said that you had been sent by Donald Trump. That's laughable. Sam Antar's not a Trump supporter. He's a Democrat. And his investigations are not politically based.
00:07:08.840And you weren't sent by Donald Trump. But you were there to videotape documentation of what you were saying. She claimed that she was at church when this happened. Do you think she was really at church?
00:07:23.060Well, no, because Sam and I were there on a Friday afternoon. So we saw that Letitia went to the, you know, Al Sharpton's National Action Network, which is very typical, I've noticed, going way back to Bill Clinton, when he was busted for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
00:07:38.860He showed up at these black churches trying to cloak himself in this air of righteousness of people who are struggling for civil rights somehow that are being persecuted. So Letitia, I'm seeing, is following that same formula. She went to go to speak to the black community with these false claims that she was in church on a Friday afternoon and that somehow she's being persecuted.
00:07:59.820So she's getting more and more desperate. She hired this Democrat fixer attorney, Abby Lowell, who put out a letter to Pam Bondi, which was just a PR stunt. It had no legal substance whatsoever. He completely misstated the documents. He misunderstood the documents.
00:08:16.540And I think she's in big trouble. And the reason I went to her house is because of what she said. No one is above the law. And that's what Sam and I checked it out. And we confirmed our research that all of her real estate filings were fraudulent.
00:08:30.280Public record because of the required disclosures she must make as an elected official under New York state law. To me, the August 2023 act of signing a specific power of attorney in connection with the mortgage on a property in Norfolk, Virginia, claiming that it would be her, quote, principal residence.
00:08:54.460That was a legally binding statement that I think automatically vacated her position as New York attorney general under public officers law 30. This declaration came just 45 days before she launched her landmark civil fraud case against Donald Trump.
00:09:12.680It also potentially constitutes mortgage fraud under 18 U.S.C. 1014, which criminalizes false statements made to obtain a loan.
00:09:24.220This is a material problem for a couple of reasons. If she did move to Virginia, which, of course, she didn't.
00:09:31.760She's therefore ineligible to be attorney general. And if she signed it and didn't move, she's clearly guilty of mortgage fraud.
00:09:41.940Her excuse, or I should say her answer, both herself and by her lawyer, Abby Lowell, was that she had filed an additional application in which she was not required to live in the property to obtain the mortgage.
00:09:58.460There's no record of that. The New York Times wrote it as a fact without producing any such document.
00:10:04.860And these power of attorneys are signed at the conclusion of the mortgage transaction, not at the beginning.
00:10:15.260It looks to me that she's trying to lie her way out of this.
00:10:19.060Yeah, I can comment on that. What her attorney, Abby Lowell, said, this is Hunter Biden's attorney and Bob Menendez, gold bar Bob's attorney who's going to jail.
00:10:27.680Well, what he did in his response that he made public to Pam Bondy, he said there's a couple of informal emails that Letitia sent where she said it would not be her primary residence.
00:10:39.240But that in no way negates the fact that in the mortgage document that the lender relied on to come up with their rates, that that's the document they relied on to approve her mortgage.
00:13:27.500If she was a purchaser of the property, she should have showed up as someone on the deed, and then she would have had to sell the property to her cousins in some manner.
00:13:36.560There's no record of her ever been selling the property.
00:13:39.060There's no record of her reporting this real estate acquisition or this real estate holding on her campaign finance forms.
00:13:49.000So that's a big hole in reporting, and why she bought this property for her cousins but never appeared on the deed is definitely a type of mortgage infraction that has to also be looked at.
00:14:02.800For anyone who thinks that we are nitpicking here, let me remind you, Letitia James indicted President Donald Trump in a civil action,
00:14:10.840claiming that he inflated the value of his assets in order to obtain commercial real estate loans, loans that were paid back in full and on time,
00:14:22.520in which the lenders made $40 million in interest.
00:14:28.220In every one of those cases, the lenders testified that they had conducted their own due diligence as to the value of Trump's assets,
00:14:37.620that no bank, no lender, would take the borrower's word for the value of their assets.
00:14:45.500They would be required, actually, to do their own due diligence to come up with a defensible number on which they felt comfortable making the loan.
00:14:55.060Letitia James says this is retribution, it's revenge, because she won a, I think it's a $580 million judgment.
00:19:48.720And Roseanne is a very important figure in America.
00:19:51.980This really tells her whole life story, including how she got essentially canceled for being a Trump supporter when they tried to say that she made a tweet that was racist, even though it wasn't, because they were out to get Trump.
00:20:04.460So she was kind of the first victim of cancel culture, where they cancel you for being a Trump supporter.
00:20:09.720And this film tells the whole real story about her life, how she became a Trump supporter, and what really happened and why they tried to get her out of Hollywood.