Trump's Federal Housing Finance Chief Abused His Office to Dig Up False Accusations Against Fed Governor to Fire Her

Sep 13, 2025

Donald Trump has already sent Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte to abuse his power by digging up accusations against Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, providing Trump with a fake excuse to fire her “for cause.” Cook and the Fed have refused to accept her firing and are challenging it in court.

Now Reuters reports evidence that Pulte’s accusation against Cook is false:

A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.
The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said. …
Administration officials led by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have used mortgage documents from her Atlanta and Michigan properties to accuse Cook of claiming both as her “primary residence.” The allegedly false claims of residence, which could improve mortgage and tax implications for a homeowner, led Pulte to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, prompting a federal investigation and an order by President Donald Trump to dismiss her. …
In another point that could help Cook’s case, she never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official.

Not only did Pulte abuse his power to go fishing for dirt against a political target; he never investigated the case to determine whether the accusation was even true. But here’s the kicker in this report: “Last week, Reuters reported that Pulte’s own father and stepmother had declared two homes in two different states as their primary residence.”

It would be a kind of poetic justice if Pulte failed to dig up evidence against Trump’s enemies—but inadvertently exposed fraud by his own parents.

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.