Lisa D. Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, denies President Trump’s accusation that she committed mortgage fraud, which is the reason he has given for seeking to fire her.
But she also objects to how he went about trying to remove her, saying his tactics violated her right to due process.
Whether the law requires she be afforded due process — and what that process would look like if it does — are among the questions the Supreme Court will consider.
At a minimum, Ms. Cook’s lawyers told the court, due process requires formal notification of the charges against her and a hearing at which she can tell her side of the story.
Instead, her lawyers said, Mr. Trump rushed to judgment. In August, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said on social media that he had referred allegations about Ms. Cook’s banking records to the Justice Department for a criminal inquiry. (She has not been charged with any crime.)
Thirty minutes later, Mr. Trump posted that “Cook must resign, now!!!” Five days later, he said he was firing her, also on social media.
Ms. Cook’s lawyers argued that Mr. Trump’s haste violated her rights. “At no point did he invite a response to the allegations — to the contrary, his public comments made clear that he was not interested in hearing Governor Cook’s response and that she should either ‘resign’ or be ‘fired,’” they wrote.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, disagreed. “The president provided enough process by publicizing the criminal referral against Cook, then waiting five days before removing her,” he wrote in a Supreme Court brief. In the meantime, he said, she could present her defense.
No hearing was required, Mr. Sauer added. Indeed, he wrote, it was not clear “what the hearing would look like or how it could make any difference here, given Cook’s failure to identify in her briefs which factual allegations she would dispute.”
Arguments about due process, Mr. Sauer said, were a recipe for needless delay.
“When Congress makes principal officers removable ‘for cause’ without prescribing any process,” he wrote, “this court should not allow them to evade removal — and trigger further constitutional concerns — by insisting upon a hitherto unspecified process that lower courts would presumably have to devise and implement in months of further litigation.”
In November, Ms. Cook’s lawyers set out her response to the accusations against her in a letter to the Justice Department, calling them pretextual and baseless.
In a supplemental brief, Mr. Sauer called the letter “too little, too late.”
“Regardless,” he added, “the proper remedy for any procedural defect would be, at most, to require a hearing, not to reinstate Cook.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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