Letitia James has built a national profile from the New York attorney general’s office, but one New York attorney argues that profile has come at the expense of the job voters actually hired her to do. In an op-ed published by American Thinker, Marina Bejarano — an attorney and former writer and researcher for Fox News’s judicial and legal analysts — makes the case that New Yorkers heading to the polls should replace James with Saritha Komatireddy, a former federal prosecutor now running against her.
Bejarano frames the race around a simple question she poses repeatedly: why is the state’s top law enforcement official so famous, while New Yorkers feel less safe? Her answer is that James made pursuing Donald Trump her political identity before she ever took office — a point Bejarano treats as disqualifying for someone who is supposed to act as an impartial officer of the law rather than announce a target in advance.
The fraud case and who paid for it
The civil fraud case James brought against Trump produced a headline-grabbing financial penalty. But as Bejarano notes, that outcome did not survive appellate review: in August 2025, an appellate court threw out the monetary award as unconstitutionally excessive. For Bejarano, that sequence — a spectacular penalty that failed constitutional scrutiny, but generated enormous publicity — encapsulates how the office has functioned. And she is blunt about who footed the bill: New York taxpayers, from police officers and firefighters to bodega owners, doctors, lawyers, and small business owners.
The op-ed also ties James to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, describing her as his political godmother. Bejarano points to James’s support for his candidacy, the political standing she lent to his rise, and the fact that she personally administered his oath of office. She also criticizes Mamdani’s statement on the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, calling it a denial and inversion of the truth that incites violence against his own Jewish constituents. James’s role in elevating him, Bejarano writes, is part of her political legacy and belongs in this election conversation.
Bejarano extends the argument to James’s prominent role in bringing the Democratic Socialists of America into the political mainstream. Her objection is not merely ideological: she argues that the state’s top law enforcement office lent its authority to a movement that calls to defund the police. That choice, she says, deserves to be front and center for voters.
Her public-safety argument is deliberately non-partisan in its framing. Poor neighborhoods need law enforcement, she writes, and so do wealthy ones. Everyone walking home deserves protection. When someone is stabbed in the street, Bejarano argues, the expectation should be an arrest, a prosecution, and punishment — consequences for the attacker and protection for the next person on that block. That, she says, is the standard by which James should be judged, and it is a standard she believes James has failed.
The Medicaid fraud numbers
The op-ed’s most concrete data point concerns taxpayer dollars. Citing the Justice Department, Bejarano writes that New York’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit averaged more than 100 criminal indictments a year from 2016 through 2018, before James took office. From 2021 through 2025, under James, she says that average fell to just nine — a drop of more than 91 percent.
That contrast sets up her introduction of Komatireddy, whom she describes as a former federal prosecutor who spent more than a decade handling international terrorism, transnational criminal enterprises, money laundering, and foreign public corruption. Komatireddy’s leadership roles included chief of international narcotics and money laundering, according to Bejarano, who also notes her Harvard College and Harvard Law School degrees, her four young children, and that she lives uptown.
For Jewish New Yorkers in particular, Bejarano says the stakes are personal. She notes that Komatireddy has challenged James over her record, accusing her of failing to criminally prosecute a single hate crime during her two terms. Meanwhile, Bejarano argues, James’s political protégé keeps feeding an inversion of truth that emboldens those who intimidate and threaten Jewish residents.
The through-line of the piece is that New Yorkers should not have to settle for a political celebrity whose defining priority was Donald Trump while she helped elevate radical DSA politicians. James’s record is on the ballot, Bejarano writes — and so is her role in Mamdani’s rise and the political legitimacy she helped give the DSA. Voters, she argues, have every right to judge those choices together.
The op-ed ends where it began, with a question directed at her fellow New Yorkers: what does it say about us if we don’t stand up and demand the accountability and public safety we deserve on Election Day? For Bejarano, the answer is a top cop who will actually do the job — and a vote to replace the one who, in her view, has not.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/new-yorkers-have-the-opportunity-to-replace-letitia-james-and-should/