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A Georgetown University law professor is questioning the legal foundations of the Trump administration’s attempts to force Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook from her job with accusations that she committed mortgage fraud, calling President Trump’s actions “illegal” and the machinations of Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as “outlandish and desperate.”

Adam J. Levitin, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Finance at Georgetown Law, shared his views in a series of posts on the blog Credit Slips. In the post “Bill Pulte’s Enemies List,” Levitin accused Pulte of abusing his position in a specific targeting of someone viewed as an obstacle to the Trump administration.

“What troubles me here is not the possibility of garden variety fraud by a federal official in her personal capacity,” Levitin writes. “Instead, the real problem here is that Pulte used the apparatus of the FHFA to target a political opponent. Pulte’s abuse of office is a far, far greater offense than any personal mortgage occupancy fraud by a federal official.”

Levitin continued, “I want to emphasize how absolutely extraordinary this is. Pulte’s letter to DOJ with a criminal referral is curiously silent on how FHFA learned of the alleged occupancy fraud. Dollars to donuts, however, issues with Cook’s loan file weren’t caught in some routine audit or the like. No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit. Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook’s loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.”

Levitin added, “Pulte has crossed a really dangerous line in democracy. He should resign.”

In the post “The President’s Firing of Lisa Cook Is Illegal,” Levitin argued Trump’s insistence that he had the authority to dismiss Cook was seriously lacking since his action was based solely on Pulte’s referral letter to the Department of Justice and not on any criminal indictment.

“But even if mortgage fraud were actually an adequate basis for ‘for cause’ removal, Trump has no basis for concluding that Cook actually engaged in mortgage fraud,” he wrote. “The only thing the President has to go on is the evidence adduced in FHFA Director Bill Pulte’s criminal referral letter. That evidence would not, standing alone, be grounds for a prosecution.”

Levitin then stated, “The only evidence Pulte presents is that (1) Cook took out mortgages on two properties within a couple of weeks, (2) the security instrument for each contains a covenant stating that she intended it to be her ‘principal residence’ for one year hence, and (3) one property was briefly listed by someone as being available to rent. None of that evidence is sufficient proof of mortgage fraud.”

Levitin also called out the argument that Cook supposedly listed two mortgaged properties as her principal residence.

“Moreover, even if Cook did know that she was promising to have both properties be her ‘principal residence,’ it isn’t clear that she was making a false promise,” he explained. “The term ‘principal residence’ is not a defined in the security instruments, but it is not the same phrasing as ‘primary residence’ (as used in the UMRA). Pulte and Trump both gloss over this distinction as does a lot of the reporting, but I think the distinction matters. ‘Principal’ is more capacious than ‘primary,’ and is capable of covering multiple residences. Imagine someone who has a co-op in NYC, a house in the New York suburbs, and a condo in Florida and splits time among all three depending on seasons and days of the week, spending roughly a third of the year at each. That person might very well consider himself to have more than one principal residence. Or consider the President himself: he has an official residence in DC, a home in Florida, a home in New Jersey, and a home in NYC (among others). Can it be said that only Mar-a-Lago is his principal residence, but not the White House or Trump Tower?”

In the post “Pulte’s Latest Bad Faith Accusation,” Levitin viewed the FHFA director’s second criminal referral against Cook as “more outlandish and desperate than his original attack.”

“Pulte’s latest claim is based on Cook having rental income from 2021 second home mortgage in Cambridge,” he wrote. “Pulte alleges that this means that Cook defrauded the lender by claiming the property as a second home, when it was actually intended as an investment property. Once again, this is Pulte acting in bad faith to abuse his authority. There is no basis whatsoever on the current evidence for Pulte to be making a mortgage fraud referral to DOJ for Cook’s Cambridge mortgage.”

Levitin declared that Pulte had no knowledge of whether Cook rented out the Cambridge property for the entire year or just short term, observing that Pulte’s failure to “quote the key ‘short-term rental’ language is suggestive that he’s acting in bad faith.”

Levitin also stressed that breach of contract and promissory fraud are not synonymous.

“The difference is about intent,” he said. “If Cook broke her promise about property use (and that isn’t clear), all that shows is a breach of contract. For it to be fraud, she would have to have never intended to perform the promise in the first place. Pulte has no evidence whatsoever about Cook’s intent at the time she took out the mortgage. He hasn’t even shown a breach of contract, much less common law fraud, not to speak of a federal criminal law violation. But here I am arguing legal technicalities when we all know this is pretextual and done in bad faith.”