The software company founded by billionaire Peter Thiel has enabled his buddy, President Donald Trump, to conduct hardcore AI lawfare beyond its previous bounds.
Those bounds appear to now include the Federal Reserve Board after Trump told its Governor Lisa Cook she was fired earlier this week.
The hit was achieved with the contrivance of an ever-striving 37-year-old nepo baby with a heretofore forgettable name. He is Bill Pulte, who seized a chance to make a mark for himself when President Trump appointed him to the usually low-profile position of director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
Pulte took his first big step toward becoming his own man back in May, when he announced that he had entered into a partnership with Thiel’s Palantir to establish an “AI-powered Crime Detection Unit (CDU).”
In a jumble of acronyms, the newly formed CDU would immediately start work at the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), which the FHFA oversees along with a sibling, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).
“No one is above the law,” Pulte dramatically declared at a press conference as if his liege, Trump, does not routinely act otherwise.
Pulte continued, “In partnership with Palantir, Fannie Mae’s Crime Detection Unit will increase safety and soundness by rooting out bad actors in our housing system. This cutting-edge AI technology will help us find criminals who try to defraud our system.”
Fannie Mae President and CEO Priscilla Almodovar told reporters that in an early test, the Palantir-assisted CDU needed just seconds to detect fraud that investigators would have otherwise required months to identify.
“By integrating this leading AI technology, we will look across millions of datasets to detect patterns that were previously undetectable,” Almodovar said. “This new partnership will combat mortgage fraud, helping to safeguard the U.S. mortgage market for lenders, homebuyers, and taxpayers.”
Palantir co-founder and current CEO Alex Karp predicted, “This partnership with Fannie Mae will set off a revolution in how we combat mortgage fraud in this country. We are bringing the fight directly to anyone who attempts to defraud our mortgage system and exploit hardworking Americans.”
The value of such a potent weapon against major fraud was undeniable if it was indeed wielded to protect working Americans. But the announcement received only modest attention. And it seemed that, however grand the CDU sounded, it was not likely to make Pulte more than just the grandson and namesake of the man who founded America’s third-largest residential construction company, the PulteGroup. Mortgages and Fannie Mae just did not seem to get people fired up.
But, along with being able to detect major fraud nearly instantly, the CDU could just as easily identify minor violations in applications made years before from mortgages that remained in good standing. And from out of a pool of more than 50 million mortgages, the magic of Palantir AI produced a pair of applications for different homes in different states, in Michigan, and in Georgia, that Lisa Cook filed two weeks apart. She appears to have claimed both were her primary residence, in each instance qualifying for a more advantageous rate. Palantir AI even scrubbed the internet for rentals, indicating that one of the supposed primary residences had been listed.
Pulte filed a criminal referral with Ed Martin, a U.S. Department of Justice Special Attorney and director of the Weaponization Working Group, which is tasked with investigating the Biden administration’s supposed use of the law to target political opponents. Martin was instead investigating two objects of Trump’s ire, New York State Attorney General Leticia James and U.S. Senator Adam Schiff, for misstatements in mortgage applications. These cases predated the May announcement of the Palantir partnership and may have involved much more laborious, old-school targeting.
Neither FHFA nor Palantir responded to Daily Beast queries about the workings of their partnership, but in any event, Pulte’s ends of the search almost certainly started with the names of the targets, followed by the applications and any irregularities they contained.
With near instant results from Palantir AI, Martin now set to investigating a third Trump perceived foe. Pulte announced online that the targets had come to include Cook and pinned a post in which he sounded like a MAGA mortgage evangelist.
“The sanctity and integrity of mortgage applications and mortgage contracts are paramount. Violating the integrity of these agreements means putting the entire country at risk. This is why, in my mind, mortgage fraud is such a serious crime.”
Trump sent Cook a letter informing her that she had been fired. Cook has replied with a lawsuit contending that the President can only fire a governor of the Federal Reserve Board “for cause.“ Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, contended that cause did not include “an unsubstantiated allegation about private mortgage applications submitted by Governor Cook prior to her Senate confirmation.”
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has scheduled a hearing for 10 a.m. Friday. And, whatever the immediate outcome, what started with hardcore AI lawfare is likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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