Churchill: An embarrassing defeat for Letitia James

Gun Rights

TROY — As a state lawmaker, Steve McLaughlin made his name as a loud and strident critic of Andrew Cuomo, a governor who had never been known for taking criticism well. It’s safe to say that the pair were not on friendly terms.

But McLaughlin and the man he once dubbed “a schoolyard bully” eventually found common ground. They might not be pals, exactly, but they share a nemesis. Her name is Letitia James, and she’s the attorney general of New York.

It was James, of course, who released a compilation of sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo, leading to the Democrat’s resignation. And it was James who brought criminal charges against McLaughlin, accusing the Rensselaer County executive, a Republican, of stealing $5,000 from his campaign and falsifying records to cover it up.

“This is all speculative nonsense from a weaponized AG,” McLaughlin said soon after the charges were filed. “She’s hunting me, just like she’s hunting Trump, just like she’s hunting Cuomo.”

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With all due respect to McLaughlin, if James were, in fact, on a hunt, Donald Trump and Cuomo would be the big game and he’d be … a hare, perhaps? Not a trophy you’d hang on the wall.

But that isn’t the reason James’ criminal case against McLaughlin always seemed odd. It was that the alleged crime involved such a small sum of money, and that the money was taken from campaign funds for which the rules are infamously capricious, opaque and lenient. Plus, the charges were filed four years after the alleged crime.

In this world full of large-scale malfeasance, why was James pursuing this case? My assumption, at least, was that the small-potato allegation must be a precursor to larger, more damaging ones. But it never was. There was nothing more.

In the end, then, James was attempting to take out a democratically elected official on the allegation that he used campaign funds to pay back a loan used, in part, to retrieve his late mother’s ashes from a funeral home. I’m not going to say that would be ethical behavior, if proven true, but this was hardly the most lurid or damning of alleged crimes.

On Wednesday, a jury acquitted McLaughlin without even deliberating for an hour. We’ll never know if the jury didn’t find the prosecution’s evidence compelling or if they just didn’t believe the alleged crime really amounted to much of one. Either way, a trial that seemed meant to demonize McLaughlin — “a puppet master,” Assistant Attorney General Christopher Baynes called him — instead gave him the air of a martyr, despite his past controversies.

What was the point of all this? How could a lengthy fishing trip that began in 2019, involved the FBI, and combed through McLaughlin’s personal life and financial records result only in evidence that could be so quickly thrown aside by a jury? Why did James bring this weak sauce to court? How much did this farce cost taxpayers?

After those initial comments about being hunted, McLaughlin didn’t say much about James or the case — a reticence that is not in character but assumedly pleased his lawyers. But since his acquittal, McLaughlin has been happy to again describe James as a biased prosecutor who uses her office to go after political opponents.

“A malicious prosecution,” was how he described it to me. “This is not acceptable what went on here.”

Those words have been echoed by McLaughlin’s newfound compatriots, otherwise known as the Cuomo folks. Spokesman Richard Azzopardi, for example, took to Twitter to note that while he certainly didn’t like the county executive, the case against him “was always weak and reeked of overreach and politics by @TishJames and her team.”

Strange bedfellows, indeed.

To be sure, I’ve admired some of what James has done, particularly her report on nursing homes deaths from COVID-19, and her shortcomings do not mean that the findings of that and other investigations aren’t accurate. But nobody can really deny that James — who has sued abortion protesters, the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Buffalo and Albany, Donald Trump and his children, the Trump Organization, and the National Rifle Association — seems eager to target ideological opponents yet rarely finds fault with those with whom she agrees.

Would James, if presented with precisely the same evidence, have charged a progressive Democrat with the accusation levied against McLaughlin? It’s hard to believe that she would have. It’s as if James selects her defendants and then hunts for something to charge them with.

That isn’t how attorney generals are supposed to operate, of course. But I suppose we could debate whether James is worse in that regard than her predecessors, including the man who used the office as a pathway to the governor’s office and remained there until she released the report that led to his resignation. 

James, though, should be embarrassed by the so-called case that resulted in the fast acquittal of McLaughlin. What a waste of time. What an abuse of power.

cchurchill@timesunion.com ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill

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