New York AG Letitia James Uses Lawfare to Try to Shut Down Pro-Life Group

Conservative leaders are decrying the legal ensnarement of New York Families Foundation Executive Director Jason McGuire by the state’s Democratic Attorney General Letitia James, who they say targeted McGuire and his organization for political reasons due to his pro-family and pro-life advocacy.

Last week, McGuire began his sentence of eight weekends in prison after he pled guilty to two campaign filing misdemeanors in April. But the legal saga really began some seven years ago in 2018, when McGuire’s organization, the New York Families Foundation, came under severe scrutiny from the attorney general’s office for reasons that have never fully been made clear.

On Monday, Craig DeRoche, president and CEO of the Family Policy Alliance, joined “Washington Watch” to sift through the facts of the case.

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“[Letitia James] went on … a witch hunt,” he underscored. “She was using her power to subpoena documents and hire forensic auditors to look for ‘t’ crossings and ‘i’ dottings, with the hopes that she could find something. There wasn’t any crime committed. She did this for three years. She subpoenaed over 7,000 documents and had scores of attorneys and staff people doing this. And what she found after all these years in 2025, was that there were six receipts missing from a filing that should have been included in 2019, and that is the letter of the law. [McGuire] had the receipts, he just didn’t include them. He didn’t steal money. He didn’t do anything. But to the letter of the law, that is actually a violation.”

But as DeRoche went on to describe, the real reason for James’s legal onslaught quickly became apparent when the case went to court.

“It was all to get [his] donor lists,” he related. “[McGuire] showed up at the end of the thing and said, ‘Wait a second, all I was doing is missing receipts. Here they are.’ … They got the judge to say, ‘The next step is you have to turn over your donor list.’ So he said, ‘Well then, I’m guilty,’ thinking, ‘Whatever, I’ll just pay a fine.’ … And the judge radically — along with the prosecutor — said, ‘We’ll teach you a lesson until you get under our heel, until you hand over your sermons and your donor lists, you will spend time incarcerated.’ So he was incarcerated until 6 a.m. this morning, and he’s got to go back for six more weekends. That is the banana republic justice system in New York state.”

The legal targeting of McGuire is especially notable due to Letitia James’s past history of prosecuting conservative political figures, most infamously when she prosecuted then-former President Donald Trump’s business organization in 2022 for alleged fraud. In a highly controversial judgment, Trump’s organization was ordered to pay $464 million for alleged property value fraud. Trump has appealed the ruling. In addition, James herself is currently under investigation for mortgage fraud.

While predicting that McGuire will likely eventually succeed in gaining some amount of justice through wrongful incarceration and defamation suits, DeRoche emphasized that James’s actions are dangerous because they are primarily motivated by political animosity. “[R]ight now, a human being is incarcerated because he’s trying to stand up for the lives of the unborn. That’s what this is over. She wanted our donor list. She wanted to suppress trying to protect women in girls’ sports. That’s all that this thing is about.”

DeRoche further detailed how lawfare was employed against him for being conservative. “[I] got prosecuted in 2010 for two and a half years for possession of a firearm while intoxicated and didn’t even have a gun. … I won that case, by the way. … They literally made it up, and people weren’t used to that back in 2010, for police and prosecutors to manufacture an event and prosecute a former speaker of the House in Michigan.”

DeRoche concluded by urging Christians to not only pray for McGuire’s safe passage through his legal ordeal but also for Letitia James.

“[B]e praying for Letitia James,” he entreated. “She is setting herself up to be one of these American figures that books will be written about. We have to progress toward that more perfect union, the arc of justice bending toward humanity and justice that Martin Luther King talked about. She’s an example of what we need to get rid of in public policy. … [I]t’s extra constitutional. She is literally the tip of the spear of what is wrong with lawfare in America.”

LifeNews Note: Dan Hart writes for the Family Research Council. He is the senior editor of The Washington Stand.

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