The Dictatorship
How the administration’s ‘trumped-up’ mortgage fraud claims have backfired
By Chris Hayes
This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 18 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Thursday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to immediately fire the only Black woman serving on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, Lisa Cook. It was the latest step in Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to gain control of the Fed and run the country’s monetary policy in violation of the entire structure of the independent central bank.
It does seem a little odd that three people Trump has it out for just all happened to commit the same infraction, doesn’t it?
Trump claims he can fire Cook for cause. The cause, he says, is alleged mortgage fraud. The White House claims that in 2021, Cook took out a mortgage on a condo in Atlanta, and she told the lender it would be her primary residence when she already had a primary home in Michigan.
If those allegations sound familiar, it is because Cook isn’t alone. The administration has raised similar allegations against Sen. Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia Jamesboth Democrats.
It does seem a little odd that three people Trump has it out for all just happened to commit the same infraction, doesn’t it?
So where are all these allegations of mortgage fraud coming from? From one man, it turns out. His name is Bill Pulte. He is the heir to a construction empire and a major Trump donor, who regularly blasts out pro-MAGA messages to his 3 million X followers.
Pulte was handpicked by Trump to run the Federal Housing Finance Authority. His job is basically to oversee U.S. mortgage markets, jump-start home sales and improve housing affordability. But he also has access to mortgage documents from millions of American homeowners — and it sure seems that he has been searching them for dirt the administration can use against its adversaries.
Pulte has referred Schiff and James to the Justice Department for prosecution, and in the case of Cook, he’s ginned up a pretext for her illegal firing.
This is so far beyond the pale — the political head of an agency seemingly digging through government files for dirt — that even the conservative editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has blasted Pulte’s work as government weaponization, writing it was “an ominous turn in political lawfare” and “nasty business.”
But Pulte’s accusations against Cook are not just government overreach. They are also bunk. Last week, NBC News reviewed financial documents that appear to contradict the Trump administration’s claims and show that Cook has consistently declared her Atlanta condo as a second home. The paperwork Pulte cited for his claims was likely an oversight that brought Cook no special benefits.
Senior law enforcement officials have also told NBC News that the mortgage fraud investigation into James is at a standstill “because federal agents and prosecutors don’t believe they have enough evidence to get a conviction if the case were to go to trial.”
Like Cook, James has said the allegations stem from one document that erroneously lists a second home as her primary residence, and, as with Cook, the rest of the loan documents accurately say the home would not be James’ primary residence.
Pulte’s accusations have turned out to be so overblown that it appears even Republicans are souring on him and his allegations. According to Politicoat a private dinner in Washington last week, Pulte got into a shouting match with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent over rumors that Pulte was trashing Bessent to the president. Bessent reportedly told Pulte, “I’m gonna punch you in your f—ing face.” Neither Pulte nor Bessent commented on the incident when Blue Light News asked them about it.
On top of that, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that mortgage documents show Bessent once made contradictory declarations on his mortgage declaration, just like Cook. Experts tell Bloomberg that, as with Cook’s mortgage, there’s no sign of wrongdoing on Bessent’s part, “Rather, his case demonstrates that an incongruity in home-loan filings isn’t necessarily proof of fraud.”
Lawyers for Bessent echoed that sentiment, telling Bloomberg, “There was absolutely nothing improper about Mr. Bessent’s loan applications with which he was minimally involved.”
You see, a real kind of fraud in this realm would be if you owned homes in two states and you falsely claimed both as your primary residence, and then you took a tax break for residents on both houses.
Pulte’s accusations have turned out to be so overblown that it appears even Republicans are souring on him and his allegations.
That does happen. In fact, Pulte’s parents reportedly did just that. According to records reviewed by Reuters“Mark and Julie Pulte, the father and stepmother of Bill Pulte … since 2020 have claimed so-called ‘homestead exemptions’ for residences in wealthy neighborhoods in both Michigan and Florida.”
When Reuters brought the issue to a Michigan tax official’s attention, he told them that “Revised tax bills will be issued to the Pultes, including all applicable penalty and interest.”
So Trump now wants the Supreme Court to fire the Fed board’s only Black woman for mortgage fraud that she does not appear to have committed, but that was alleged by a Trump appointee with access to everyone’s mortgage records — a Trump appointee who is using his time in public service to hunt for evidence of misdeeds by Trump’s political enemies, while his family reportedly benefits from the same dubious housing claims.
The entire affair is exactly as preposterously trumped up as you thought it was.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes”at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on BLN. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel
contributed
.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.
More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.
“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.
“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.
In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.
“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.
Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.
“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.
Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.
“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.
The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.
“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.
That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.
Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”
Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”
Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.
But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.
“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.
Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.
“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
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