As the White House intensified its campaign against Fed governor Lisa Cook in late August, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether his team was weaponizing the government by digging into mortgage records. The president rejected the premise.
Insisting that mortgage records are public, Trump told the reporter who posed the question, “I mean, you can find out those records. You can go check out the records yourself, and you should be doing that job, actually. … If you did your job properly, we wouldn’t have problems like Lisa Cook.”
The “problem,” according to the White House, is that Cook allegedly has more than one primary residence on her mortgage loan paperwork, which Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has seized on. (Those allegations started to unravel in recent days.)
But the president’s challenge — that reporters should “go check out the records” themselves — has proven to be interesting advice.
Reuters reported two weeks ago, for example, that some of Pulte’s close relatives allegedly did what Pulte accused Cook of doing. ProPublica reported around the same time that three prominent members of the president’s team — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin — also allegedly ran into the same problem. (All three denied wrongdoing in a statement to ProPublica.)
The list is apparently still growing. CNBC reported:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent once agreed to call two different houses his ‘principal residence’ at the same time — a similar claim to the one that President Donald Trump cited when he tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, according to a report Wednesday. Documents show that on the same day in September 2007, Bessent agreed that homes in both Bedford Hills, New York, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, each would be his principal residence, Bloomberg reported.
Bloomberg’s reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, and there are some nuanced differences between the Cook and Bessent cases. (Both of Bessent’s mortgages were with the same bank, for example, while Cook’s were with two different banks.)
Bessent’s office, meanwhile, gave Bloomberg a statement from Bank of America that said the lender understood “that the Bedford and Provincetown properties were secondary residences.”
Nevertheless, the similarities add to the White House’s headaches, especially given the severity of the allegations the president and his team have levied against Cook. For his part, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, another of Pulte’s targets, recently argued, “Donald Trump has made mortgage fraud accusations his weapon of choice to attack people standing in his way and people standing up to him, like me. … Should we expect Trump and his enablers at [the Justice Department] to make sensational accusations against and investigate his own Cabinet?” If recent history is any guide, I think we know the answer to that question. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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