Letitia James

political career, took in her ailing mother, a commitment that several people who’ve known her for years spoke to me about in hushed tones. “I don’t know how she did it,” said one. “I know she hired caretakers, but to have your sick mom in your house, that’s a huge deal.”

“In terms of being in a committed relationship,” James volunteered, “it has its pluses and it has its minuses. I give so much in terms of my work, and I love my job and what I do in public service. The last person I dated said to me, ‘You’re just married to your work,’ and that was that. And I guess he’s right.”

That James was forthcoming on this subject took me by surprise; she is famous for the scrupulous care she takes to keep private matters out of the papers and the office. When I told one of her longtime colleagues that I knew nothing about her personal life, the colleague laughed and said, “If you know zero, I may know 5 percent, and I’m not exaggerating.” In early December, this colleague told me, “We know she spent time with people at Thanksgiving, but we’re not quite sure who those people are. She brought a ham. We know that much.”

James’s penchant for privacy, though, can work against her. “She is not a self-promoter, to a degree that I imagine frustrates her staff,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who told me of a call James convened on March 19, 2020, when the mayor and governor were in locked-horn ego paralysis over whether the city should shut down in response to the pandemic. James brought together faith leaders, scientists, and City Council members, and by the end of the evening call, there was consensus in favor of a shutdown, and James promised to convey this to the governor. The next morning, Cuomo announced a full shutdown.

“I am quite confident,” said Levine, “that that call from Tish was the moment he realized the political winds had shifted.” (A spokesperson for Cuomo said, “Tish James did not speak to the governor about this call,” adding that “it had no impact on our decision-making.”) What Levine took from the experience was the memory of James working well outside the lines of her AG role and refusing to publicize her involvement. “She was not looking for credit,” he said.

In Brooklyn, James remains a local fixture. A self-described “church lady,” she attends services across the street from her home in Clinton Hill every Sunday. She hangs out on her stoop, chatting with her neighbors. During a January phone call, James’s call-waiting alert kept pinging. “I have to answer calls, even calls that I don’t recognize, because you never know,” she said. When she came back on, she reported to me and to her aide, Delaney Kempner, that it was her neighbor, Ms. Jenny. As our hour was winding up, James told Kempner, “I’ve got to go talk to Mr. Widdy at the supermarket because he has problems.” Meanwhile, neighbors on the block had rodent issues, and James had to deal with that, too.

It was tempting, understanding politics as self-aggrandizing performance, to suspect that the whole Mr. Widdy–Ms. Jenny– rodent-problem thing was a bit. Like a comedy skit about a politician who’s trying to bring Trump down with one hand and unclog a voter’s drain with another. Staffers told me they urge her to pull up and away from these local responsibilities, but she refuses. When I told James that dealing with rats on the block (“Rodents—don’t say rats,” she chided me) sounds like the job she held as a City Council member, not the state’s attorney general, she replied, “Yeah, my neighbors don’t care about that. I’m just Tish, as far as they’re concerned.”

James has a history of disregarding the parameters of her jobs. As public advocate, she was accused of making liberal use of lawsuits, including on behalf of tenants living in dilapidated buildings. “A number of the cases we brought were dismissed because as public advocate I did not have standing,” she admitted. “Well, then I rose up to attorney general, and no one could question my ability to have standing at that point.”

In James’s view, that’s what power is for: to push every button available to you and, therefore, to gain access to as many buttons as possible. In the more traditional approach to politics, the goal of access is generally relentless accrual: of money, of allies, of loyalties and lackeys, which together lead to higher office and, with it, more power, more money, and even higher office. James certainly has the impulse to ascend, but she maintains that the ascent isn’t for its own sake.

“I’m a Libra,” she told me. “And I get crazy or motivated to do something because the scales of justice and my sign are off. Whenever I see something wrong, I’ve got to step in and do something or say something. A clergy member says that there’s a minister in me struggling to come out. It’s just trying to correct the universe and have it more balanced, to make sure the voices of the dispossessed and disenfranchised and disinherited are heard.”

James knew as well as anyone that she was making a deal with the devil when she agreed to take the state party’s endorsement in 2018. She understood the assignment, too, and appeared game to complete it, at one point defending scuzzy comments Cuomo made at a Women for Cuomo event—“One of the few men in a room full of women,” he reportedly said. “Could be worse … Usually it is worse”—after his opponent Cynthia Nixon called them “Trumpian.” James responded, “What did he say that was offensive?” The Women for Cuomo event was cut into a television ad in which James made an appearance—a boost for the governor, free ad time for her.

The New Yorker quoted one Teachout supporter saying, “Is she independent from Andrew Cuomo or not? … Is she gonna trust her conscience or is she gonna write him a blank check? He’s used her as a prop in my opinion.” Spitzer told the New York Times, with accidental prescience, that “perhaps no criterion is more important right now than the capacity of the next attorney general to be independent … The occupant of that office must have the wherewithal to pursue cases against the most powerful forces without regard to political consequences.”

Roberto Ramirez reminded me that New York is a state which until 2018 had never elected a Black or female governor or attorney general. “Tish James did exactly what she needed to do to do away with more than 200 years of history,” said Ramirez. “It would’ve been political malpractice for her not to do that.”

The way she always saw it, James said, “Governor Cuomo brought me to the party. But maybe this speaks to the reason why I’m single: Once you bring me to the party, I tend to go my own way.”

This was not a possibility that seems to have occurred to Cuomo himself.

“Our relationship started to go south starting with the Green Light Law,” James recalled.

Cuomo, known on the left for publicly voicing enthusiasm for a progressive agenda that he would then work to impede behind closed doors, had previously been mealymouthed in his support for the measure, which faced resistance from conservatives. But progressives had gained control of the State Legislature in 2018, and Cuomo promised to make the bill a

legislative priority. In 2019, Democrats brought the Green Light bill to the Senate floor for a vote.

On the morning of June 17, the day the Senate was set to debate the bill, the governor announced that he would only sign it if the solicitor general, Barbara Underwood, could confirm that the federal government, via ice, would not be able to access DMV records. Staffers for both women understood Cuomo’s ice concern to be a pretext for not wanting to pass a bill he felt would damage him with voters upstate. Cuomo’s office turned to James, increasingly anxious that the AG release a statement calling the bill unconstitutional or arguing that it was vulnerable to federal interference. For James, it was another instance of the governor being “a dino—a Democrat in name only—in certain instances,” as she put it.

According to sources briefed on the matter, Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa— understood by all to be the governor’s mouthpiece—called the AG’s office aggressively demanding that it fall in line. DeRosa and Cuomo, who subsequently joined the call, reminded members of James’s team that the governor had the power to defund her office.

James released her statement of support for the bill at 7 p.m. The measure passed 33-29. Cuomo “flipped out and called me, and we had a spirited conversation,” James said. He was forced to sign the bill late that night.

One source close to James recalled the episode as “the first where he expected us to do his bidding and we didn’t do it and he was embarrassed. And most important, the right thing was done and the public benefited.”

Six weeks later, Cuomo took James on the fishing trip to Lake Ontario, reminding her of the value of loyalty.

Then came James’s nursing-homes report. She had understood, going into that investigation, which was undertaken by her office’s Medicaid Fraud Control unit, “that there would be blowback,” she said. “But the concern was vulnerable senior citizens in nursing homes.” When the investigation was ready for publication, the AG’s office gave the governor’s office a call as a courtesy to let them know the report was coming.

DeRosa was furious. Accordin to sources familiar with the exchange, she yelled, threw out insults, and implicitly threatened the AG’s office, demanding that the report not be released. A spokesman for Cuomo denied that DeRosa issued threats or insults.

Two months after the nursing-homes report, Cuomo’s back was against the wall. Amid cascading stories from women accusing him of inappropriate workplace behavior, and after unsuccessful attempts to put friendly judges in charge of an investigation into the allegations, Cuomo played his last card. He pleaded with questioners at a March 7 press conference, “Let the Attorney General do her job. She’s very good, she’s very competent, and that will be due process and then we’ll have the facts.”

“I know Tish did not relish the idea of doing that investigation,” said New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who has known James for years. “But what choice did she have?”

Everyone in New York has a theory about what happened with James’s gubernatorial misstep. Celinda Lake, a pollster for the aborted campaign, said that initial polling had shown James and Hochul “equal in name recognition and favorability and job performance, and actually a little bit more intensity on the AG side.” But the fund-raising gap “was spooky,” she told me. “The pace of the money Hochul was raising was pretty sobering and daunting and surprising.”

That Hochul had the opportunity to amass a war chest in the late summer and

early fall was, in part, because James was trying to put some distance between her campaign and the harassment investigation. Announcing her run while compiling a damning report on Cuomo, she understood, would have made her vulnerable to charges of opportunism.

That delay gave Hochul the chance to open up a jaw-dropping funding lead. The speed at which donors coalesced around the new governor was striking, a testament perhaps to her unanticipated political gifts, but also to some of the twisted dynamics in play: The lieutenant governor, who had previously remained silent on the harassment charges against Cuomo, was benefiting from his fall from grace, while the attorney general who’d been tasked with holding him accountable was paying a steep political price.

Although James was widely expected to announce her candidacy, emily’s List endorsed Hochul before James entered the race. James’s crossover appeal has always been with Black voters and white liberals, and white women’s generally warm feelings toward Hochul threatened to eat away at that base upstate and on the Upper West Side. Even some progressives, not inclined to be Hochul people, admit a degree of fondness for the new governor, especially after the decade of Cuomo. “I know it’s a low bar, but not having a governor who’s a garbage-human sociopath is a good thing,” said Bronx state senator Gustavo Rivera.

Meanwhile, James’s successor as public advocate, Jumaane Williams, entered the race from her left in mid-November. Most expected that if James outraised him, he would drop out quickly. But she has long been known as a terrible fund-raiser, a situation that mystifies almost everyone I spoke to for this article. She’s great with people, she’s a hero to many, and over the years, she’s managed to win multiple races without a ton of money. She should not be a bad bet. It’s true that she doesn’t come from the kind of wealthy white networks that can be easily soaked for cash. Spitzer, for example, funded two consecutive AG campaigns with his father’s money at $4 million a pop. But these days, it is also possible for Black and brown candidates from cash-poor backgrounds, especially those with national profiles, to raise staggering sums.

Some believe James has internalized the conviction that she can’t raise money. Without a greater sense of entitlement, and with little enthusiasm for putting in six hours of call time a day (“I hate it,” she told me flatly), her self-doubt on this matter may have become self-fulfilling prophecy.

James said she had initially entered the race because she thought herself “well suited to serve as the governor of the State of New York.” But she had reservations almost immediately upon announcing. “There was no way that I could manage the office, stay on top of investigations and litigation, and at the same time run for governor,” she said. “I was more interested in the work than in campaigning. And I used to come up with excuses instead of making cold calls to raise money … I decided to withdraw and also recognize that my heart really wasn’t in it.”

Whatever comes of her investigation into the Trumps, she is perceived in at least some quarters as having blown any future chance at being governor. If Hochul wins, she could stay there for a long time, and James is already in her 60s.

There is another lens through which her withdrawal matches the late-pandemic Zeitgeist: In an age in which millions are questioning the expectation of ever higher advancement, she was declining to grasp the next rung on the ladder, determined instead to focus on work that she felt was more substantial. It is hard to imagine any of her immediate predecessors in the AG’s office—Spitzer, Cuomo, or Schneiderman, all of whom, behaving as though their power left them immune from consequence, ultimately resigned in disgrace— doing the same.

The costs to women who challenge powerful men are steep. Those who come forward with stories of abuse or discrimination are routinely depicted as fame-seeking profiteers, even when there is literally no profit to be made. They are portrayed as aggressors, even when they have been aggressed upon. Brutes assume the posture of the brutalized, while the brutalized get tarred as lying bullies. These unjust patterns are, of course, immeasurably more damaging to those who are not the attorney general of New York, who don’t have the professional, economic, or political support networks that Tish James has.

But the frame is being applied to her too, as the figure charged with providing what these men say they want—due process— but who in the end declines to vindicate, defend, or submit to them. Which is, of course, what they really want and what they believe they deserve.

Now Cuomo and his team are determined to cast James, like the women who came forward with stories of his inappropriate behavior, as dishonest, calculating, striving, and mean. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Cuomo described a 165-page report, covering interviews with 179 people and a review of 74,000 documents, as “a brand of ugly politics I had never seen before.” He claimed that James’s investigation of him was in service of her gubernatorial ambitions, and that her report—as opposed to his behavior—“hurt a lot of people in a lot of different ways.” He is filing complaints against James and the seasoned investigators she chose for the harassment case, Anne Clark and Joon Kim, with the misconduct-review board.

Powerful people turn to this defensive playbook again and again because it works—again and again. The day after Cuomo’s Bloomberg News interview, Sunny Hostin of The View parroted Cuomo’s characterization of James: “He said that with Letitia James this was a political prosecution, and I think there is something there. Where there’s some smoke, there’s fire. She was interested in running for governor … It does appear to be a little politically motivated.”

That Cuomo gave an interview lacing into his party’s attorney general and women he has been accused of harassing in the midst of rumors that he might reenter politics— that reads as normal, comprehensible. Of course he’d want to return to political office. James’s behavior, on the other hand, can be easily cast as ugly and self-interested. That’s because her claim on power still reads to millions as aberrant, threatening, fundamentally illegitimate. Even though she is no longer even running for governor—even though the sexual-harassment report her office commissioned likely cost her a chance at the office, rather than boosting her ability to win it—the very fact that she ever contemplated it renders her suspect.

“The bottom line is he wants redemption,” said James. “But I can’t give him redemption. Only God can give him redemption.” When I pointed out that he seems also to want revenge, she replied, “He’s a very vindictive individual. He said he’s going to file a complaint, a grievance-committee complaint against me. File. File it.”

Many in her camp are all too aware that he can enter the race for his old job and run against her not in the Democratic primary but as an independent, armed with a formidable war chest. At the very least, he can be a thorn in James’s side. In late February it was reported that a group called Friends of Cuomo is going to start running ads claiming he has been exonerated of the harassment charges.

“He has $16 million, so he can make flashy ads till the cows come home,” said Rivera, who nonetheless noted that Cuomo has ceased to hold the state in his punitive grip. “My colleagues are no longer scared of him,” said Rivera. “The shook ones are no longer shook. So please, Papi, please, bring it.”

“We’ll see,” said James of the possibility that Cuomo might run against her. “If he

wants to talk about his record, I would be more than happy to expose his record.”

James claims she is undaunted by these guys. “It’s just another day,” she said to me on several occasions. But enough of those days, those years, can wear on a person. “She’s a regular human being,” said someone who has known her from the start of her political career. “She doesn’t have that thing like Cuomo and de Blasio have, where they’ve convinced themselves they have superhuman powers to be right all the time. That’s the armor white men build. Tish doesn’t have that. And I worry that that’s the way you survive this roughand-tumble job.”

To listen to how the right wing talks about Tish James these days is to catch a familiar chill. Newsmax host Greg Kelly regularly lays into her, accusing her of staging a “freaking witch hunt” against Cuomo. Over a video mash-up of James talking about his father, Eric Trump tweeted that the “entire system in New York” is “weaponized and if you’re not one of them, you don’t stand a chance,” an us-versus-them locution that positioned James not as an elected official but as an armed menace, a dog whistle for the Trump family’s base. After Mazars’ abandonment, Donald Trump used similar language, alleging that his former accountants had been “scared beyond belief” by

James, as if she were an assailant posing, in his words, a “constant threat.” Weeks earlier, he had told crowds that “these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors … they’re not after me, they’re after you.”

We know what he’s saying when he urges these crowds to “the biggest protest we have ever had” should prosecutors—James chief among them—continue to hold him accountable. It’s an old sentiment, the low and scary call to arms by those who feel they’ve been dispossessed of their rightful authority and impunity by a person they feel should never have been in a position to come for them in the first place.

Maybe because the victimization-ofthe-white-patriarchs narrative gets so much play, it’s easy to lose sight of what has provoked it: the breathtakingly extensive domino effect of Letitia James’s tenure as AG.

The nursing-homes report led to the progressive uprising against Cuomo that made space for women to come forward; the harassment claims, in turn, led to his resignation, which led to the firing of his brother, Chris, from CNN, which led to the firing of CNN boss Jeff Zucker, who happens to be the television executive who helped create Donald Trump by green-lighting The Apprentice. James—the first Black woman to hold state office in New York—has directly or indirectly parted some of the state’s most powerful white men from their jobs, their book profits, their accountants, their perches high at the top of literal networks, systems they believed themselves born to command.

It is no small thing to use power as James has. And no one should underestimate the risks she has incurred by doing so.

In one January conversation, she brought up a memory from her mother’s later years, when her mom was living with her and James was serving on the City Council.

“She had no idea what I did,” James said. “And I didn’t want to tell her.” Her mother, she explained, “grew up in the South and was afraid of confronting people, particularly white people, particularly powerful white people. She remembered crosses and hangings.” As a result, James said, her mother stayed to herself, was wary of putting her head up, and James didn’t want to worry her by telling her she had won elected office and was becoming an increasingly public figure.

“I remember one time when we went for a walk in the neighborhood, and she asked me, ‘Why does everybody know your name, Tish?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the president of the block.’ She said, ‘Okay, well … just be careful.’ And that was that.”