When Humbling Black Women Is A Political Game

They came for Fani Willis.
They came for Marilyn Mosby.
They came for Lisa Cook.
And now, they’ve come for Letitia James.

This is no coincidence. This is a calibrated campaign to strike fear into Black women who dared to occupy power, to question a powerful, corrupt, racist white man, and to hold the pillars of justice and policy. The audacity of Trump and his cronies to frame decent, professional Black women for mortgage fraud as if that’s the mortal sin of political life in a nation built on grift.

But why mortgage fraud?

Because it’s subtle. It’s technical. It’s the kind of charge that looks clean in a headline and filthy in a courtroom. It doesn’t require a smoking gun, just a signature, a checkbox, and an assumption of intent. Mortgage fraud lives in the gray zone between paperwork and persecution, which is precisely why it’s so useful for political revenge.

It’s the perfect weapon for those like Donald Trump who’ve committed real fraud at scale. He and his henchmen can dress up their vengeance in the language of legality. They can say, “We’re just enforcing the law,” while they weaponize bureaucracy to criminalize Black women for daring to own property, power, or narrative space.

It all starts in the shadows with whispers in bureaucracy, referrals from regulatory offices, letters stamped “investigation,” paper trails dissected for the faintest discrepancy. Trump’s people, including agencies now under his influence or scrutiny, peer into loan applications, home-residence declarations, and occupancy statements. They search for one misstep, one paperwork inconsistency, to brand a public servant a felon.

Because they know that very few cases of mortgage fraud are simple. The lines are blurry. Life complicates residence. Personal decisions, family dynamics, and rental arrangements all create ambiguity. That lack of clarity is fertile ground for accusation. Under that uncertainty, they pounce on the Black women who tried him.

Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, a relentless critic of Trump, is now the latest to be indicted by a federal grand jury for alleged bank fraud and false statements tied to a mortgage application. She’s accused of mislabeling one of her properties. James has denied wrongdoing and called the charges politically motivated. The timing is intentional. We are deep in the heart of a political season, and the motive is plain as day: weaken a formidable opponent who previously led a civil fraud case against him.

Marilyn Mosby, once a rising star in legal ranks, endured the hammer of justice. Mosby’s mortgage fraud conviction was later overturned by an appeals court, but not before the damage had been done through years of corrosive reputational cost and the shadow of criminality hanging over her name.

Mosby was targeted because she dared to do what few prosecutors had ever done: charge police officers for killing a Black man. Her decision to indict the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death made her a marked woman. The backlash was instant and coordinated through police unions, conservative media, and political operatives who painted her as reckless, radical, and corrupt. When they couldn’t beat her in court, they went after her home. They went after her finances. They wanted to remind her, and every other Black woman in a position of authority, that there are consequences for holding white power accountable.

Lisa Cook, a sitting Governor at the Federal Reserve Board, hears whispers that she, too, is under investigation. That somewhere, someone unearthed evidence of her declaring dual properties as primary residence. If true, this is a technical violation. If false or exaggerated, it is pure political sabotage.

Trump, with characteristic bombast, calls for her resignation, even attempts to remove her “for cause” by hunting for legal language to justify a purge.

And why her?

Because she is the first Black woman ever to sit on the Federal Reserve Board, an institution that, for over a century, was an ivory tower of white male economists shaping the nation’s wealth. Her scholarship exposed how racial violence and discrimination distort economic growth. Her very presence in that chair is a rebuke to the mythology of white meritocracy. By targeting her, they aren’t just questioning her paperwork; they’re questioning whether a Black woman has the right to define economic reality itself.

This isn’t about mortgages. It’s about power, intellect, and the terror of seeing a Black woman at the center of America’s financial brain trust.

What we’re witnessing in these cases is a web of semantics: “primary residence,” “investment property,” “vacation home,” “occupancy,” “intent.” It’s a world of forms, signatures, disclosures, not the boldface corruption that demands high proof. And that is its weapon: ambiguity.

Four Black women in power, each accused or investigated under the same cynical script: dig into their private lives, their homes, their finances, their relationships. Find something—anything—that can be weaponized into a scandal. The charge doesn’t even have to stick. The goal is humiliation. The mission is containment.

And the gall of it, my god the freakin’ gall of Donald Trump and his people to come after these women for “fraud.” This is a real estate mogul who overvalued his assets by hundreds of millions of dollars is now watching his allies prosecute Black women over line items on loan forms. The man who’s built an empire of theft and deceit dares to point his stubby finger at the very women who have spent their lives cleaning up the wreckage his kind left behind.

It’s always the same choreography. First, the whisper of impropriety. Then the “exclusive” leak. Then the congressional hearing, the indictment, or the ethics probe. Trump’s orbit doesn’t need conviction; it just needs confusion because it thrives on spectacle, on smearing Black women’s competence and dignity through the slow grind of bureaucratic cruelty. White theft is enterprise, Black success is suspect.

So now, Letitia James gets indicted on bank fraud and false statement charges, accused of mislabeling a Virginia property on loan paperwork. Marilyn Mosby is dragged through years of court battles over whether she misrepresented her mortgage application on a Florida condo. Lisa Cook, a sitting governor on the Federal Reserve Board, suddenly faces “referrals” to the Justice Department over an alleged dual residence filing, as though her brilliance in economics now hides a secret hustle.

And then there’s Fani Willis. The woman who did what no one else had the courage to do: indict Donald Trump for trying to steal a presidential election.

The moment she did, the machinery of retribution roared to life. They couldn’t challenge her case on its merits, so they went for her pockets. They dragged her into court, forced her to testify about her private life, her spending, and her travel. They asked who paid for the airline tickets, who picked up the dinner checks, and who covered the hotel rooms. They called her ethics into question because a Black woman in power must forever prove her virtue in public. They made her financial life a crime scene, not because she stole, but because she stood up.

Mortgage fraud. Bank fraud. Financial misconduct. “Improper” spending. The details differ, but the strategy is identical: turn a technicality into a takedown.

They know these women are meticulous, overqualified, and dangerous to their mythology of white male infallibility. So, they pick a charge that sounds damning to the public but lives in the gray area of technicality.

They don’t need proof of deceit, and they just need to sow enough confusion to turn headlines into handcuffs.

Because every one of these women represents a disruption to the old order. They are the new face of accountability. They embody something this country was never built to accommodate: Black women who do not flinch when standing across from power.

Letitia James didn’t blink when she took on Trump’s empire. Fani Willis didn’t blink when she indicted him. Marilyn Mosby didn’t blink when she held police officers to the same standards as citizens. Lisa Cook didn’t blink when she entered the highest echelons of economic policymaking.

So, they found another way to make them bow through the slow bleed of legal warfare.

Trump’s allies understand that the modern battlefield isn’t the courtroom, it’s the process itself. You don’t need to win. You just need to make the fight so grueling, so demeaning, that your opponent crawls away exhausted.

This assault is not just personal, it’s symbolic. It’s a message to every young Black woman who dreams of becoming a judge, a policymaker, a prosecutor, a governor: Be careful. The white man is watching your paperwork. Each indictment, each hearing, each investigation says: We can come for you next.

But we must respond with our own message: Try it.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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Letitia, Lisa, Fani, And Marilyn: When Humbling Black Women Is A Political Game was originally published on newsone.com