Even if Cook’s acts reflect gross negligence, the President expressly determined that her lack of care in making important financial representations provides sufficient cause for her removal because it “calls into question [her] competence and trustworthiness as a financial regulator.”
—Request to Supreme Court for an administrative stay overturning district and appellate court rulings that bar President Donald Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, September 18, 2025.
President Donald Trump’s insistence, at this late hour, that he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook for cause constitutes a refusal so extreme to acknowledge mounting contrary evidence that you could almost call it heroic. The Supreme Court would be nuts to take up this case.
Let’s review what we’ve learned since Trump fired Cook on the grounds that she engaged in “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct” by claiming two residences (in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Atlanta).
Yes, claiming two primary residences on a mortgage application is often illegal. It is also so common that no fewer than four members of Trump’s Cabinet—that’s one-quarter—have done the very same thing. They are: Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy; Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin; and, we learned just this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. And don’t let’s forget Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. If “lack of care in making important financial representations … calls into question” one’s “competence and trustworthiness as a financial regulator,” why does Bessent still have a job? Because the reason cited for Cook’s firing is transparently phony.
There’s no reason to think Chavez-DeRemer, Duffy, Zeldin, Bessent, or Wiles did anything illegal or notably unethical when they claimed multiple residences as “primary.” (It probably occurred in the course of initialing a stack of documents at closing prepared by a lender, mortgage broker, or real estate attorney; in Bessent’s case, through a lawyer acting as proxy.) But there’s even less reason to think Cook did.
In theory, claiming two residences as “primary” can deceive the lender into giving the second-home-buyer a lower interest rate. (Banks consider owner-occupied homes a safer investment.) But in fact, the lender often knows already that it’s a vacation home.
In Bessent’s case, loans for the two homes (in Bedford, N.Y., and Provincetown, Mass.) were made on the same day in 2007, and by the same lender, Bank of America, so it’s hard to see how anybody could have been deceived. In Wiles’s case, two homes, both designated on mortgage applications as primary, were purchased 15 months apart in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. But the second home was a primary residence not for herself but for her daughter, Caroline.
Chavez-DeRemer, Duffy, and Zeldin all ended up with two primary residences because political engagement has a way of complicating your life. Chavez-DeRemer moved to Oregon to run for Congress, while Duffy and Zeldin moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the Trump administration. The case of California Senator Adam Schiff, who as a House member led the first Trump impeachment, resembles that of Duffy and Zeldin, but of course only Schiff is being investigated by the Justice Department. There’s absolutely no reason to think any of these people, Schiff included, committed mortgage fraud.
Any suggestion of fraud is even less appropriate in Cook’s case. Last week, Reuters reported that a loan estimate for Cook’s second home in Atlanta showed that Cook declared it to be a “vacation home,” which by definition is not a primary residence. The document from the lending institution, Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union, said: “Property Use: Vacation Home.” For good measure, Cook also declared the Atlanta home to be a “2ndnd home” on a federal document she signed in 2021 in order to obtain a security clearance.
Oddly, none of this information turns up in the two judges’ decisions against Trump in the Cook case. The Reuters story showing three Trump Cabinet members did the same as Cook predated District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb’s injunction blocking Cook’s removal. But Cobb didn’t use it. She concluded that “for cause” didn’t cover anything Cobb may have done before she assumed office. The Reuters story about Cook telling her lender the Atlanta mortgage was for a second home appeared before the appellate decision, but that, too, got left out. Like Cobb’s ruling, the D.C. circuit argued that “for cause” applied only to actions taken while in office. The two decisions also noted the absence of due process. Cook could have gunned down 14 schoolchildren before she became Fed governor and the lower courts wouldn’t have cared.
Still, these new revelations show that, if these legal proceedings ever get around to examining Trump’s stated basis for Cook’s firing on its own terms, it won’t go well for Trump. Trump isn’t embarrassed that his rationae for firing Cook lies in tatters, so, as usual, we must be embarrassed for him.
I haven’t even mentioned Letitia James, the New York attorney general who last year won a $355 million civil fraud case against Trump. ABC News reported this week that Ed Martin, director of the Justice Department’s (ill-disguised) Weaponization Group, and Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Authority, are exerting heavy pressure on prosecutors to nail James for claiming, in mortgage documents, homes in Brooklyn and Virginia as primary residences. Way back in April, Pulte referred James’s case to the Justice Department.
It was evident from the start that this case was a dog. About the Virginia property, James had emailed her mortgage broker, “this property WILL NOT be my primary residence,” and on another form, when asked whether it was her primary residence, James checked “NO.” How do you get an indictment out of that? You don’t, and Justice department prosecutors in Virginia’s Eastern District who’ve wasted the past five months investigating the case know it, according to CNN and ABC News. But their inaction prompted Pulte (according to ABC News) to urge Trump to fire their boss, U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert, and there’s every reason to believe that vindictive, brainless prick will do so.
Pulte is the instigator of the mortgage-fraud witch hunt, having referred Schiff, James, and Cook to the Justice Department in order to ingratiate himself with Trump. I suggested last week that it was unlikely Pulte dug up his rival Bessent’s mortgage history to share with Trump, but that was before we knew any such history existed. Now it seems more plausible that this explains why Bessent told Pulte, “I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face.” Everybody, it seems, wants to punch Pulte in his fucking face. Schiff’s attorney, Preet Bharara, suggested in a letter to the Justice Department last spring that it investigate “Mr. Pulte’s role in this sordid effort,” and while that seems unlikely at the moment, Pulet’s got “fall guy” written all over him.
Indeed, the only tangible punishment Pulte’s mortgage-fraud inquisition has thus far inflicted is against his own father and stepmother. In digging up examples of people who, like Cook, claimed two primary residences in mortgage documents, Reuters identified Mark and Julie Pulte. But in their case the offense was much more serious because, according to Reuters, they did it not on mortgage documents but on tax forms by claiming homestead deductions in both Bloomfield Township, Michigan and Boca Raton, Florida. “It’s not something that either state generally lets you get away with,” Lisa Bender, a real estate agent who’s worked in both jurisdictions, told Reuters. Bender was right. Reuters reported this week that Bloomfield Township just socked Mark and Julie for back taxes. Now maybe they want to punch Pulte in his fucking face, too.
The post Trump’s Argument for Firing Lisa Cook Lies In Tatters appeared first on New Republic.
