Former assistant New York solicitor general Brian Ginsberg echoes Trump attorney’s description of embattled AG
President Donald Trump and his allies aren’t alone in accusing New York attorney general Letitia James of abusing her prosecutorial powers. A former high-ranking official in her office is now on the record saying the same.
Former assistant New York solicitor general Brian Ginsberg, who reported to James from 2019 through 2022, warned the Supreme Court in a May 12 filing that James is abusing her prosecutorial powers in an ongoing Title IX case against a western New York school district over four disparate sexual misconduct allegations between its students. Ginsberg minced no words about his former boss, urging the Supreme Court in his writ of certiorari to take up the case to “disabuse opportunistic attorneys general” like James from the notion they can misuse their parens patriae powers—the doctrine she used to justify her involvement in the case which enables the government in limited instances to prosecute lawsuits on behalf of individual citizens.
Ginsberg reminded the Supreme Court that James has a history of allegedly abusing her powers, citing comments from a justice of the New York supreme court in November 2024 reprimanding James for bringing forward a politically charged environmental case against Pepsi, which the court tossed.
“The same New York State Attorney General who initiated this action against the School District has been judicially chastised for abusing her power to initiate representative actions to launch ‘predatory lawsuits that seek to impose punishment while searching for a crime,'” Ginsberg wrote in his Supreme Court filing, citing comments from New York supreme court justice Emilio Colaiacovo in the Pepsi case.
Ginsberg’s allegations of prosecutorial abuse against James echo similar statements made by Trump attorney Clifford Robert, who admonished the attorney general in January 2024 for her “shameless abuse of power” in her efforts to prosecute Trump.
Ginsberg, who declined to comment, is no stranger to the rules governing James’s prosecutorial powers. As one of her assistant solicitor generals, Ginsberg was part of an elite team of attorneys that pursued appellate cases at the state and federal levels on behalf of James. Ginsberg helped litigate more than a dozen cases in the Supreme Court, including a 2021 case against the National Rifle Association and a 2020 case where he unsuccessfully defended New York’s coronavirus restrictions on places of worship.
Ginsberg left James’s office in 2022 to work in the private sector, and now the former assistant solicitor general is defending the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District against a 2021 lawsuit from James alleging it systematically failed to protect its students from sexual assault and bullying by their classmates. James seeks to force the school district to “stop its unlawful practices.”
The attorney general cited four disparate examples of student-on-student sexual assault and bullying at various schools. Typically a state attorney general is barred from intervening in legal disagreements between individuals or small groups of people, but James invoked the parens patriae doctrine, arguing that she has standing to pursue the matter because the school’s conduct impacted “the health and well-being of the People of the State of New York as a whole.”
A federal district court said James was wrong and dismissed the suit in 2022. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s ruling in October 2024 and allowed the case to proceed.
That’s where Ginsberg came in. He wrote in his May 12 writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court that the Second Circuit improperly gave James the green light to proceed in the case “on the basis of unrelated incidents involving individual students” that didn’t justify the use of the “extraordinary mechanism of parens patriae litigation by the State of New York.”
Ginsberg said it was high time the Supreme Court clarified the rules governing parens patriae powers, a tool he said is often wielded liberally and improperly by aggressive state attorneys general such as his former boss. Parens patriae lawsuits, Ginsberg wrote, withhold procedural protections from defendants in individual disputes because the plaintiff is backed by the full weight of the government.
Ginsberg’s unflattering description of his former boss is just the latest black eye for James. The Department of Justice this month launched an investigation into allegations that she falsified documents to obtain favorable loans on her properties in New York and Virginia.
Prominent Republicans noted the irony of the mortgage fraud allegations against James, who said “everyday Americans cannot lie to a bank to get a mortgage to buy a home” in February 2024 after she secured a $486 million judgment against Trump for allegedly falsifying his business records.
“The hypocrisy is staggering: Tish James allegedly committed the same crime that she falsely and illegally prosecuted President Donald Trump for,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) said in a statement highlighting her efforts to oppose James’s “political weaponization and abuse of her office.”
James did not return a request for comment.
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