Two weeks ago, as the Trump administration intensified its campaign against Fed governor Lisa Cook, a reporter asked the president whether his team was weaponizing government by digging into mortgage records. The Republican rejected the premise.
Insisting that mortgage records are public, Donald 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.
But the president’s challenge — perhaps reporters should “go check out the records” themselves — has proven to be interesting advice. ProPublica reported last week, for example:
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.
A day later, Reuters advanced the broader story in an even more provocative way:
Close relatives of the federal official who has accused a Federal Reserve governor of improperly claiming primary residence on two properties have declared the same status on two homes in two different states, public records show. Mark and Julie Pulte, the father and stepmother of Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump’s appointee as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, since 2020 have claimed so-called ‘homestead exemptions’ for residences in wealthy neighborhoods in both Michigan and Florida, according to the records.
None of the relevant players responded to Reuters’ request for comment, and the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.
That said, immediately after Pulte filed a criminal complaint against Cook with the Justice Department, quite a few observers made the case that the underlying issue is quite common and rarely prosecuted, which necessarily raised questions about selective enforcement and why the administration is going after the president’s perceived foes and not his allies who appear to have done the same thing. For his part, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, another one of Pulte’s targets, responded to the ProPublica reporting last week by saying “the hypocrisy of the Trump administration is nothing short of staggering.” The senator added, “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.
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."
Latest Post
Recommended
