The New York Post is enthusiastically backing prosecutor Saritha Komatireddy for attorney general, saying Letitia James stopped protecting the public while crime climbed and political lawsuits piled up.
The New York Post has endorsed Saritha Komatireddy in the race for New York attorney general, casting the career prosecutor as a sharp break from incumbent Letitia James on crime, fraud, and basic public safety.
Komatireddy is 41, a mother to two sets of twins under 10, and a federal prosecutor who worked under both parties. The paper describes a record built on locking up terrorists, cartel members, cybercriminals, and other serious offenders, and a promise to use the attorney general’s full powers against street crime, fraud, and corruption.
James took office in 2019. Since then, the Post reports, felony assault in New York City is up 44%, and subway felony assault is up 59%. Those numbers sit at the center of the endorsement’s case: New Yorkers were told the job was about protecting them. The results point the other way.
Komatireddy did not pitch the race as abstract theory. She tied it to what her own circle has lived through in the city.
She told the Post:
"We’ve had a member of my family assaulted in the subway, taking my kids to school. We have a family friend who had a stray bullet come through her bedroom while she was sleeping,"
She went further on the trend line since James arrived:
"New Yorkers don’t feel safe, they feel less safe now than when Tish James began as attorney general and the reason is simple: They are less safe now."
And on James’s performance in the role:
"She stopped doing the job."
That charge is not a vibe. It tracks a long list of policies James has backed across 25 years in elected office, the same soft-on-crime agenda the endorsement says hollowed out deterrence while serious violence rose.
James has described the attorney general’s role as “focused on civil matters and not criminal matters.” The Post treats that line as a confession, not a technicality. Street safety, fraud enforcement, and criminal accountability are not side quests for the state’s top lawyer. They are the job New Yorkers expect someone to do.
Instead, the endorsement maps a career of priorities that weakened the machinery of public safety. James backed decriminalization of so-called minor offenses, “Raise the Age” legislation, no-cash bail and discovery reform, the “Right to Know” and “How Many Stops” acts, closing Rikers, the chokehold ban, and marijuana legalization. Whatever the sales pitch at the time, the Post’s point is blunt: she spent years pushing to loosen the system, then watched assaults climb on her watch as attorney general.
Frontline cops get a different standard in that record. The paper says James is eager to prosecute officers yet slow to clear them when charges fall apart. Taxpayers and lawful residents live with the downstream mess, open disorder, slower consequences, and a signal that the rules bend for the wrong people.
The endorsement also hammers James for turning the office into a political weapons shop. She first ran promising to go after President Donald Trump, and the Post cites a two-year span in which her office sued Team Trump 66 times. That volume is not neutral lawyering. It is a choice about where limited staff time and public money go.
The same critique covers spending. The paper reports James has burned $20 million or more hiring outside lawyers, and steered at least $54 million in taxpayer funds to nonprofits it describes as friendly to criminal defendants. Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld, cast as a whistleblower inside the office, has called out what he frames as gross abuses of power, burning significant public dollars to target convenient political enemies rather than grinding through core enforcement.
On Medicaid fraud, the Post’s verdict is harsher still: it says James runs one of the softest shops in the country and has allowed the theft of billions. When an attorney general’s office shrugs at fraud on that scale, the bill does not vanish. It lands on taxpayers who already pay for subway assaults, crowded dockets, and the social cost of policies that treat consequences as optional.
Komatireddy’s pitch is the opposite posture. The Post presents her as someone who spent a career imprisoning real threats and earning promotions into top nonpartisan federal posts, not as a politician who collected headlines by hunting enemies. She says she will crack down on crime, including fraud and corruption, and make the streets safer. That is a plain job description for attorney general, not a culture-war stunt.
New York does not lack for laws on the books. It lacks leadership willing to enforce them without apology. Felony assault up nearly half since 2019, subway felony assault up even more, and an incumbent who frames the office as mainly civil work while stacking political suits and shipping tens of millions out the door, that is the contrast the endorsement draws, in hard numbers and direct quotes.
Komatireddy’s family story is not offered as melodrama. It is offered as proof that the statistics have names and addresses. A subway assault on the way to school. A stray round through a friend’s bedroom wall. Parents who plan routes and bedtimes around disorder they did not create. An attorney general who treats that reality as someone else’s portfolio has already told voters what comes first.
New York needs a top cop in the attorney general’s chair, not a political operator who lost the plot on crime. Komatireddy still knows the difference.
