However else he will be ranked by history, President Trump has already outdone his predecessors in shameless hypocrisy.
And he has outdone even himself with his effort this week to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors after one of his appointees accused her of making false statements concerning her primary residence on a pair of mortgage applications.
“As detailed in the Criminal Referral, you signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump said in an August 25 letter to Cook that he posted online. “Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year. It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second. It is impossible that you intended to honor both.”
Compare those alleged transgressions to the 2022 civil case where a New York state judge found that Trump had engaged in decades of loan fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars on a scale that ”shocks the conscience.” Trump’s prime defense was a real estate variation on an old basketball principle: No harm, no foul.
“There was no fraud, harm, or damage of any kind,” his attorney Chris Kise told the court.
Trump himself repeatedly noted that nobody lost money on the loans in question. He was partially vindicated this month, when the state appellate court tossed out the $515 million fine that the trial judge had imposed when finding Trump liable for business fraud. Trump claimed “total victory,” but the allegations themselves remain. He was still a guy who reported in a list of assets in a loan application that his Trump Tower penthouse is 30,000 square feet when it is in fact just a third of that.
Trump is also somebody who perceives harm whenever his plans are hindered. He then seeks to hang a foul on whoever he considers to be at fault. And he has a host of appointees who are ever eager to ingratiate themselves by assisting him in exacting revenge. Minions on the ascendance include his head of the Federal Housing Financing Agency (FHFA). Bill Pulte has morphed himself from a Twitter philanthropist into an attack dog, managing to lodge criminal referrals for alleged fraud against three Trump political targets out of 50.8 million mortgages on record with the agency.
The numbers say he could only have started with names and then sought out whatever crimes he could allege, however technical. Those who have been accused as a result all deny any wrong doing.
The first of the three criminal referrals was filed in April and concerned Letitia James, who filed the mega fraud case against Trump. Pulte alleges that James listed as her primary residence a Virginia home she purchased with her niece. James is also alleged to have reported in a 2001 mortgage application that her Brooklyn row house has four units, when it is classified as five. Pulte went back 43 years and millions upon millions of mortgages to find an application in which James allegedly listed her father as her spouse.
A second criminal referral was filed in May against U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California, a longtime Trump critic. Schiff is alleged to have listed both a condo in Burbank, California and a house in Potomac, Maryland as his primary residence in mortgage applications. Never mind that members of congress often have residences in their home state and in the Washington, DC area.
On August 15, Pulte filed a third criminal referral, this one against Cook. He went on CNBC to say Cook should step down. “I think she will have to resign, or I think she will be fired,” he said.
Trump echoed him on Truth Social: “Cook must resign, now!!!”
Cook made it known she was not going anywhere. Trump responded with the high-toned letter to Cook in which he condemned her for doing what he had done for decades on a HUGE scale.
“You are hereby removed from your position on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, effective immediately,” Trump wrote in the letter, which he posted on social media. “I have determined there is sufficient cause to remove you from your position.”
There remains a question of what constitutes cause. Among the dwindling limits of Trump’s power is one that says the president can only remove a governor from the federal reserve for cause. Cook made due note of that in a statement she released through her attorney.
“President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” Cook said. “I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”
Doubling the dose of the hypocrisy, the three criminal referrals were sent to Ed Martin, director of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, which is tasked with investigating the Biden administration’s supposed use of the law to target political opponents. He is now investigating James, Schiff and Cook. They are not likely to be the last as Trump continues to outdo his predecessors.
The post Opinion: How Trump Served an Obscene Double Dose of Loan Hypocrisy appeared first on The Daily Beast.
