Eric Schneiderman on Keeping Trump in Check and Maybe, Maybe, Investigating the Russian Ties [View all]

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The evening that Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, plunging Washington into chaos and possibly propelling the nation toward a constitutional crisis, the president’s most persistent legal antagonist was flying high above America. On a cross-country JetBlue flight, Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York State, was watching a seat-back TV when he learned the news the way almost everyone else — including Comey — did, with a shocking flash. “There was a group of lawyers on the plane who recognized me,” Schneiderman said the next day. As the news spread through the cabin, he began to feel glances directed his way. The usual decorum fell away, and one passenger leaned over to Schneiderman. “I bet you can’t wait for the plane to land,” he said.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Schneiderman is enjoying this turbulent political ride we’re on, but history has conspired to place him in a vital place on the ground. Since the election decapitated Democrats on the national level, putting Jeff Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice and leaving Republicans in control of congressional oversight, Schneiderman and other Democratic state attorneys general have led the legal resistance to Trump. Long before the Russians — or really anyone — dreamed of a President Trump, Schneiderman was investigating him, pursuing the allegedly fraudulent marketing of his for-profit university. And long before Trump was attacking federal judges, the leaky intelligence community, or law-enforcement officials with a reputation for stubborn probity, he was ridiculing New York’s AG as a “lightweight.” The idea that Schneiderman, a compact, tightly wound Upper West Side liberal whose office is accustomed to pursuing consumer scams or busting upstate heroin rings (as he did last week), might be a last line of defense for what he calls “bedrock principles of the United States” — it’s frankly a little preposterous. But the framers of our Constitution designed our system to have hidden pockets of resiliency, and the power of the states is one of them.

“For those of us who are protectors of the rule of law, the state attorneys general,” Schneiderman said, “we have a role to play, to make sure that the system survives.” When his plane landed, Schneiderman started contacting his colleagues in other states, as well as Democrats in Washington, coordinating an emergency response. On May 11, he joined a group of 20 attorneys general in signing a letter to Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department official overseeing the Russia investigation, calling for the appointment of a special counsel.

Even before Comey’s firing, some well-placed congressional Democrats had been urging Schneiderman to probe the Trump campaign’s suspected Kremlin connection, as far afield as that might seem for a state officeholder. But New York, of course, is home to the Trump Organization and its bank accounts. “We have jurisdiction over everything because we’re New York, and every check clears New York,” said former state attorney general (and governor) Eliot Spitzer, whose high-profile prosecutions on Wall Street demonstrated the office’s national reach. “There are odd jurisdictional hooks that sometimes come into play. Money laundering may be implicated here.”

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