Trump Must Be Furious That Revenge on Letitia James Isn’t Working Out

Donald Trump’s quest to dig up more dirt on New York Attorney General Letiita James has not gone according to plan—and now the man put in charge of the operation could be on the outs.

Trump is reportedly considering axing the attorney tasked with finding evidence that James committed mortgage fraud. Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, has already been informed that the president intends to fire him, reported ABC News Thursday night. Siebert’s last day on the job is expected to be Friday.

Federal prosecutors were unable to find incriminating evidence that James had knowingly committed fraud when she purchased a home in Virginia in 2023. But the lack of proof apparently didn’t matter to the Trump administration, which had ordered Siebert to bring criminal charges against her.

While Trump only nominated Siebert for the job in May, the decision to give him the boot a few short months later “could throw into crisis one of the most prominent U.S. attorney’s offices, which handles a bulk of the country’s espionage and terrorism cases, and heighten concerns about Trump’s alleged use of the DOJ to target his political adversaries,” according to ABC News.

Trump administration officials intend to replace Siebert with someone who they believe will be even harder on James, sources familiar with the matter told ABC.

New York’s top cop has become one of the president’s chief legal adversaries since she bested him in his bank fraud case in 2024. Trump’s revenge began to take form in April, when his administration launched an investigation into James’s personal finances, accusing her of lying on her bank statements in order to obtain better mortgage rates.

At the time, Trump referred to James as a “totally corrupt politician,” a “wacky crook,” and accused James—the first woman of color to hold statewide office in New York—of being “racist.”

James has since been a star of Trump’s political retribution tour, as she has repeatedly promised to hold him to account, regardless of his presidential status. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, James has filed 32 lawsuits against his administration. They range from legal rejections of Trump’s tariffs to fighting his “big, beautiful bill’s” attempt to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics.

Despite the apparent illegality of forcing Jimmy Kimmel out of late night, the Trump administration is moving full steam ahead on its media hit list.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr violated the First Amendment and one of Donald Trump’s executive orders Wednesday when he threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of the networks still airing the late-night comedian. Kimmel supposedly made controversial comments about the political affiliation of Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin. (Kimmel said that MAGA was rushing to claim that Tyler Robinson was “anything other than one of them”—which is technically true.)

The successive blocks to fall involved Nexstar, one of the largest owners of ABC stations in the country, pulling the plug on Jimmy Kimmel Live! mere hours after Carr’s comments. In the background of the whiplash decision, Nexstar is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar acquisition that requires the FCC’s approval—a nearly identical series of events to the ones that led to Stephen Colbert’s cancellation by Paramount in July.

Public backlash against Carr’s decision was not a deterrent. In an appearance on Scott Jennings’s radio show Thursday, Carr suggested that the popular daytime talk show The View could be the next target of the Trump administration. He questioned whether it should be considered a ​“​bona fide news show” and therefore if it was subject to the “equal time” broadcast rule, which requires news broadcasters to literally dole out equal time to both political parties.

“I would assume you can make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show, but I’m not so sure about that,” Carr said. “And I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs that you have still qualify as bona fide news programs, and therefore exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.”

What exactly makes The View worthy of being the next focus of the Trump administration’s censorship campaign is not clear, though the president has a long and nasty history with one of the show’s most famous co-hosts, Rosie O’Donnell. The current hosts include Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as spokeswoman for the Department of Defense during Trump’s first term. She and many of her co-hosts are outspoken Trump critics.

Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner on Thursday seemingly defended the censorship of anti-Trump talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel: “We want an open market for speech,” she said. “But speech comes with more than responsibility, more than accountability. It comes with the expectation that we’ll have integrity when we use our speech.”

A glaring issue with Faulkner’s statement is that her standard, “integrity,” is in the eye of the beholder. And it’s particularly rich given that the Fox host’s own statements—and those of guests on her shows—don’t exactly use speech in such righteous ways, as Media Matters has thoroughly documented.

Earlier this month, for example, Faulkner suggested that people rightly questioning the legality of President Trump’s September 2 attack on a Venezuelan boat (which the president claims was “drug-carrying”) are “working against America and for the drug cartels.” In April, she asked a guest whether former President Barack Obama and “others in his political camp” are antisemitic for supporting Harvard University amid the Trump administration’s incursions. In February, she defended deporting pregnant women and children.

In November 2024, Faulkner proposed that Representative Rashida Tlaib is a “terrorist.” (“If you support terrorists, aren’t you a terrorist?” she asked rhetorically, equating the Palestinian American congresswoman’s pro-Palestinian advocacy with support for Hamas.) In January 2024, she accused Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden’s homeland security secretary, of treason.

Guests on Faulkner’s shows—to say nothing of other Fox hosts and guests—also say plenty of noxious things, such as that drag queens reading to children normalize pedophilia, that Biden’s border policies “poison[ed] the bloodline in this country,” and that the woman at the center of Trump’s hush-money trial (and ultimately, felony conviction) was a “liar” and a “whore.”

Our math whiz commander in chief is once again promising to lower drug prices by 1,000 percent in the next year and a half—something that is virtually impossible.

“Now the drug companies agree that I’m right, and the countries … if they don’t agree, I’ll use tariffs to get them to agree. You understand?” Trump said in an interview on Fox News.

“We’re gonna be reducing drug costs over the next year, year and a half, by—not fifty or sixty percent—by a thousand percent. Because if you think, a $10 pill going so.… It’ll be raised up from $10 to $20 because it’s the world versus us,” Trump rambled. “So it’ll go from $10 to $20, from $10 to $50 or $60 for them. Which is bearable. And it’ll go from $10 to $20 for us.”

Incredibly, the interviewer did not request any immediate clarification.

This is not the first time Trump has tried to sell this particular strain of snake oil. Last month, Trump also claimed to have already cut drug costs by 1,000 percent. In reality, he hasn’t moved prices at all and has only sent a slurry of strongly worded letters to pharmaceutical companies demanding that they just lower their costs for Americans. And his tariff option, like most recklessly levied tariffs, might just raise the costs of prescription drugs even more.

“I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter,” Johns Hopkins University health policy professor Mariana Socal told the Associated Press last month, adding that Trump’s numbers were “really hard to follow.”

A month later, and they still aren’t making any sense.

Donald Trump is apparently intent on punishing media figures deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him. The day after Jimmy Kimmel was censored at the behest of the Federal Communications Commission, the president told reporters that networks are “not allowed” to excessively bash him.

“When you have a network, and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do—if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something.… When you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said Thursday aboard Air Force One.

On Wednesday, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group dropped the show. The affair was set in motion by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who threatened media companies that platform Kimmel after the comedian displayed the “sickest conduct possible,” Carr said. (In reality, Kimmel delivered a monologue in which he mocked Trump’s and MAGA’s ridiculous behavior in the wake of the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.)

Trump warned of the move against Kimmel back in July. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next,” he wrote on Truth Social after CBS announced the cancellation of anti-Trump comedian Stephen Colbert’s late-night show (which many saw as a capitulation to the president). After Kimmel’s ouster Wednesday, Trump similarly called his next shots, urging NBC to suspend the shows of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.