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, “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 as part of a broader effort to weaponize mortgage records against the president’s perceived foes.
But the president’s challenge — that reporters should “go check out the records” themselves — has proven to be interesting advice.
In fact, when reporters started checking out the records, they discovered that some members of the White House Cabinet had allegedly done the same thing Trump and Pulte accused their targets of doing.
This week, the allegations took on even greater significance when ProPublica reported that the president himself appears to have done the very thing he called “deceitful and potentially criminal.” From the report:
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a ‘Bermuda style’ home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
Oops.
ProPublica, which bolstered its report by publishing the relevant documents online, spoke to Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance, who said, “Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice. Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
A ProPublica reporter managed to get the president on the phone and asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud. At that point, Trump hung up.
A White House spokesperson, however, told the outlet, “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.” The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” concluding, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.” Trump, of course, is the first convicted felon ever to serve in the Oval Office, having been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of the Republican’s hush money scandal. As for whether the president regrets challenging journalists to “go check out” mortgage records to look for potential wrongdoing, the Republican has not yet commented on that aspect of the latest revelations. Watch this space. 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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