Indian-American Lawyer Saritha Komatireddy to Challenge Letitia James for NY AG

Accepting the nomination at the Republican Party State Convention on Tuesday, she declared, "From now until November, I will prosecute the political case against Letitia James, and unlike her, I win my cases".

James had relentlessly pursued Trump, members of his and his enterprise alleging fraud, winning his resolute hostility.

When Trump returned as president, his administration charged James with fraud over a mortgage that she had received, but the case was thrown out when a grand jury refused to indict her.

While she was a prosecutor, Trump nominated Komatireddy to be a federal judge in 2020, but the nomination lapsed when the Senate did not act on it before the end of its session and his first term.

In her decade as a federal prosecutor, she specialised in terrorism, cybercrime, transnational criminal enterprises, money laundering, and foreign public corruption and built up a formidable reputation, taking on leaders of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Mexican drug cartels.

She said that the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US in 2001 made her choose law as a career to go after terrorists.

"While I was chasing terrorists across the Middle East, I saw right here in my backyard in New York, public safety completely deteriorated," she said.

She has also served as the chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Komatireddy has bachelor's and law degrees from Harvard University and now teaches at Columbia University law school, while also practising with a law firm.

Early in her career, she was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a judge on the federal court of appeals in Washington.

The state attorney general's position in New York is an elected office and has a high national profile.

Komatireddy's opponent, James, is considered a hero by Democrats for prosecuting Trump and winning a multi-million-dollar judgement against him.

In the civil case, while Trump was out of office in 2023, a judge found Trump guilty and issued a penalty of $364 million that ballooned to about $500 million.

An appeals court, however, voided the penalty as excessive, but not the guilty verdict.

James alleged that Trump and his associates committed fraud by overstating the value of his assets.

However, he had repaid the loans, and the lenders did not question the valuation of his collateral.

- IANS