A prosecutor inside Letitia James’s own office finally said the quiet part out loud. Find the crime later. Pick the enemy first.
Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, a former Brooklyn prosecutor now assigned to the Investor Protection Bureau, sent an agency-wide email Friday to roughly 2,000 colleagues. The New York Post and Just the News report that the message was yanked from state servers almost as fast as it landed.
His boss, bureau chief Shamiso Maswoswe, had instructed him “to find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump.” The list was not subtle. Trump himself. Truth Social. Hewlett Packard, even after the Justice Department had already approved its $14 billion merger with Juniper Networks. No “credible reason,” Wiesenfeld wrote, for targeting any of them.
If you believe Trump is using the Department of Justice attorneys to prosecute his enemies and further his political interests, you should find it equally troubling that Tish is doing exactly the same thing.
Then the line that should end a career in any honest shop. “I ask that you not serve as Tish’s personal attorneys by targeting her political enemies. Instead, I hope you choose to prosecute crimes and find the individuals accountable, rather than targeting individuals and then finding crimes.”
That is not a policy disagreement. That is a confession of how the office works.
She Campaigned on the Vendetta
James did not hide this. In 2018 she promised to “prosecute the president for crimes committed in New York state.” She kept the promise. Her civil fraud case against Trump produced a grotesque penalty later stripped on appeal, leaving a liability finding without the half-billion-dollar scalp she wanted.
The man she ran against is now president again. Her office is still hunting his companies and his platform. Wiesenfeld’s email simply put the method on paper.
Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed.
James’s spokesman, Alexis Richards, called it a “personnel matter,” parked Wiesenfeld on paid leave, and insisted the office enforces the law “regardless of political beliefs.” General counsel Kumiki Gibson followed with a staff note that this was “internal” and that nobody was “in danger.”
Sure. Delete the email, isolate the man who wrote it, and pretend the targeting order never happened. That is how bureaucracies treat inconvenient truth.
The Work She Will Not Do
Wiesenfeld named the cases her office would rather ignore. Rampant nonprofit homeless-shelter fraud. Antisemitic crimes in and around synagogues. Those are real victims. Those are actual crimes. They do not produce cable hits the way another Trump filing does.
The Post has already documented the rest of the record. New York ranks dead last among the states for Medicaid fraud indictments and convictions per billion spent, while billions walk out the door. GOP challenger Saritha Komatireddy, a career prosecutor who sent terrorists and drug traffickers to prison, has flagged more than $20 million in outside counsel for work a 2,000-person office exists to do, and at least $54 million in grants steered toward groups that treat police as the problem.
James prefers suing cops and chasing headlines. The streets and the synagogues can wait.
State GOP chairman Ed Cox put it cleanly. James “weaponized the attorney general’s office into a political hit squad and then tried to cover up her tracks.” Komatireddy’s spokesman, Nicole Kiprilov, said the alternative is simple. Lock up repeat offenders. Treat the homeless. Root out fraud. Stop picking targets by party.
November Is the Recourse
Wiesenfeld does not claim he sat in the room with James when the order was given. He claims his bureau chief told him to hunt Trump, Truth Social, and a merger the federal government had already blessed, and that the office burns public money on “convenient public enemies.”
Given James’s own campaign vow, the civil crusade, the press-release factory aimed at the White House, and the reflex to disappear the email, the chain of command is not a mystery.
Law enforcement that starts with a name and works backward to a statute is not law enforcement. It is a political weapon with a badge. New York has lived under that arrangement long enough. Voters get the last word in November. They should use it.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
