Pulte Abuses His Office to Dig Out Dirt on a Federal Reserve Governor Refusing to Obey Trump to Justify Firing Her

Aug 20, 2025

The president can only fire the heads of independent agencies “for cause”—for actual, substantial misconduct in office. The Supreme Court has already let Donald Trump erode this protection, but the justices have hinted that they would preserve it for the Federal Reserve.

So Trump has turned to inventing a fake “cause” to fire a Federal Reserve governor, getting one of his lackeys, Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte, a real estate mogul, to go onto social media to make accusations of mortgage fraud against the Fed’s Lisa Cook. She is refusing to step down, challenging Trump’s authority to fire her.

The BBC reports:

“His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Cook's lawyer said on Tuesday. “We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”
Cook said in a statement that Trump “purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”
“I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022,” she added.

Georgetown University law professor Adam Levitin explains the bigger story at a credit and finance blog:

What troubles me here is not the possibility of garden variety fraud by a federal official in her personal capacity. Instead, the real problem here is that Pulte used the apparatus of the FHFA to target a political opponent. Pulte's abuse of office is a far, far greater offense than any personal mortgage occupancy fraud by a federal official.
I want to emphasize how absolutely extraordinary this is. Pulte's letter to DOJ with a criminal referral is curiously silent on how FHFA learned of the alleged occupancy fraud. Dollars to donuts, however, issues with Cook's loan file weren't caught in some routine audit or the like. No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit. Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook's loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.
And do you really think that Lisa Cook was the only one targeted?... That's got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too. …
[I]f Cook, Schiff, and James can be targeted, what stops Pulte from threatening to review the mortgage application of anyone who speaks out. And if politicized mortgage application reviews are somehow ok, won't politicized IRS audits be next?

Donald Trump himself has been convicted of multiple counts of fraud, so it is clear that this is merely a pretext for persecuting political opponents, abusing control of federal agencies to go on fishing expeditions and dig up dirt on anyone who crosses him.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.