Felon-Turned-Fraud Investigator Who Caught Letitia James in Mortgage Scandal Fires Back: Democrats Desperate to Silence Him

Democrats are scrambling to discredit the one man whose investigative work blew the lid off New York Attorney General Letitia James’ alleged mortgage fraud — and he’s not backing down.

Sam Antar, a former CFO who paid for his past crimes and went on to become a nationally respected white-collar crime researcher, says the left is fixated on his criminal history because they can’t refute his evidence.

“Did I target her? The answer is no,” Antar told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The veteran fraud analyst — once known for exposing the Crazy Eddie securities scandal in the 1980s — said James was simply one name on a long list of New York public figures he was reviewing for his investigative website, White Collar Fraud.

After serving six months of house arrest more than four decades ago, Antar turned himself into an asset to the very system he once defrauded. For decades, he has advised government agencies, law firms, and major accounting firms on high-level financial crimes. He even contributed whistleblower cases through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower program using only publicly available documents.

His findings on James — originally published in February 2025 — revealed what he called “discrepancies between her sworn financial disclosures and the official property records.” Once Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte relied on those findings for a criminal referral, the Democratic establishment went into meltdown.

Before Judge dismissed the case on Monday — citing the unlawful appointment of U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan — James’ legal team launched an aggressive offensive against Antar. Her defense attorney labeled him in court filings as a “right-wing ‘investigator’” and “fringe blogger.”

The accusation only proved how nervous James’ camp has become.

“This is what I’ve been doing for 30 f***ing years,” Antar told the Daily Caller News Foundation, noting that he doesn’t even consider himself pro-Trump. Yet Democrats are painting him as a political operative simply because his work exposed the top law-enforcement official in the most blue state in the nation.

James’ legal team even tried to undermine Pulte for taking Antar’s analysis seriously. Attorney Abbe Lowell argued that Pulte should not have relied on Antar’s blog for the criminal referral, writing:
“Many of the exhibits referenced in the referral were available from a single source (which also contains the only ‘reporting’ on the allegations that predate the referral letter): the blog of a right-wing ‘investigator,’ Sam Antar, who has claimed credit for providing Director Pulte with the facts necessary for the criminal referral. Accordingly, in crafting the criminal referral letter and the attached exhibits, Director Pulte either (1) relied exclusively on a single fringe blogger’s ‘evidence’ that AG James committed fraud, (2) took it upon himself to purchase these documents from various county clerk offices, or (3) unlawfully accessed AG James’s loan files from Fannie Mae’s database.”

Antar rejects the narrative outright. He said Pulte did not need to access anything illegally — because every document referenced on his blog was already public record. The criminal referral didn’t even include the property central to James’ indictment, he pointed out, a clear signal that investigators independently found similar issues.

James’ indictment arises from a $109,600 loan she secured on Aug. 17, 2020, for a three-bedroom home in Norfolk, Virginia. The mortgage required her to use the home as a secondary residence, yet she listed it as an investment property on her taxes and allegedly rented it to her great-niece’s family. In 2020, James reported $1,350 of rental income — but the great-niece later stated the family stayed there for free.

In a 2024 text to her accountant, James wrote: “It looks suspicious and I need to do everything according to the tax code,” telling him she wished to abandon the investment deduction — a message that reads less like honesty and more like pre-emptive damage control.

Though the judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds, legal experts say the Justice Department is almost certain to refile the charges. Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia joined the pile-on, blasting Pulte for acting on a tip from “a convicted felon who engaged in a large-scale securities scam.”

Antar says Democrats can attack him, but they can’t erase the documents.

“I’ll walk Congress through every mortgage, affidavit, and financial disclosure you, Letitia, signed — and I’ll let Abbe Lowell and Robert Garcia explain why public records magically become illegitimate the moment I read them,” Antar wrote on X.

He did not hold back when asked about Lowell directly, calling the attorney a horse’s a** — “you can quote me on that,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation — and argued that Lowell has only strengthened the case against James. Writing on his blog in May, Antar said the response from James’ team contained “factual admissions that directly contradict James’ recorded filings, sworn declarations, and financial disclosures.”

In Antar’s view, the escalation from Democrats has nothing to do with truth — and everything to do with intimidation.

“What they’re trying to do is criminalize the investigative process,” he said.

If Democrats succeed in making it illegal to examine public financial records, the scandal surrounding Letitia James could become far bigger than a mortgage case — it could become a turning point in the battle over transparency and government corruption.