How the New Attack on Lisa Cook Gives Away Trump’s Abuse of Power Game
INSIDE: Bill Pulte ... Letitia James ... Ed Martin
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Meet Bill Pulte, Trump’s Very Useful Idiot
President Trump’s attack on yet another Black woman in public office gives away the game — if you were still harboring any doubt — about his corrupt use of mortgage fraud allegations to target Democrats.
The origins of the bogus mortgage fraud allegations against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), Sen. Adam Schiff (D), and now Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee who is the first Black woman on the Fed, have a patina of legitimacy. They have come from the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in the form of criminal referrals, but don’t be fooled by that origin.
The official in question is Bill Pulte. And the way he trumpeted the Cook allegations yesterday tells you all you need to know about the bad faith origins of the allegations in all three cases.
Pulte is a 37-year-old MAGA influencer with 3 million followers on X. Before he was confirmed by the Senate to the FHFA position in March, he had had his own investment firm and served on the board of one of the country’s largest home construction companies, founded by his grandfather.
Early yesterday morning, Pulte teased the Cook allegations on X. Within an hour, he had announced the criminal referral against Cook on his X account and later posted the criminal referral letter. For much of the day, Pulte was on X trolling Cook and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, a Trump nemesis. Pulte, the originator of the criminal referral, went so far as to publicly call for Cook’s resignation and declare that Trump has grounds to fire her for cause. Pulte predicted that the Trump DOJ would open an investigation of her, at one point tweeting: “Lisa Cooked is cooked.”
Over the course of the day, Pulte retweeted the Cook-related postings of such right-wing luminaries as Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, and Ed Martin, the Trump DOJ official who reposted Pulte’s criminal referral and said “Received.” In one Cook-targeted tweet, Pulte referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as “Pocohantas.” Last night, he was talking up the criminal referral on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show. This morning, he was chatting with Maria Bartoromo on Fox Business.
“One wonders how much digging into Cook’s financial records, and those of other Federal Reserve members, was made to come up with the charges,” University of Michigan political scientist Don Moynihan writes. “Pulte is also the source of the complaints against Schiff and James. His primary activities appear to be to use weaponize public power to lead harassment and intimidation campaigns against public officials.”
On cue, Trump seized on Pulte’s allegations to call for Cook’s resignation and reportedly told aides he was considering firing her.
In a normal world, the FHFA finding evidence of mortgage fraud might sound plausible: Elected officials playing fast and loose with the mortgage rules and getting zapped by some relatively unknown bureaucrat operating by the book. But this isn’t a normal world and hasn’t been for some time.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to target James and Schiff, by name, two figures in the constellation of investigators, prosecutors, Deep State pariahs, and perceived foes he’s pledged to take his retribution against. Trump has take over the management of the Justice Department and brought it inside the White House all the while promising to use it to target his political enemies for payback.
Still, as a reasonable, sophisticated person you might feel the need to keep both possibilities alive in your head as possibly true: Trump is abusing the powers of his office to go after Democrats AND these particular Democrats engaged in wrongdoing. Those aren’t mutually exclusive propositions. And yet a decade into the Trump era, that is no longer a reasonable orientation to the world we face.
At the same time, Trump has been especially focused on targeting Black women in public life. It’s an especially striking counterpoint to President Biden, who credited Black women with his 2020 victory and made a point of breaking the glass ceiling for them during his presidency with the appointments of people like Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court and Cook to the Federal Reserve Board.
The bad faith origins of the mortgage fraud allegations give Trump a cudgel — criminal investigations of his Democratic foes — that he can keep looming over their heads for as long as he needs. In this instance, it also gives him an additional chance to target a Black woman in public office and needle Fed Chair Powell, whose independence Trump has perceived as a threat all along. It’s a trifecta of bad acts and abuse of office.
ICYMI
CNN obtained video of Trump DOJ official Ed Martin prancing around outside Letitia James house in New York:
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Weird stalking behavior
There are no "good motives" from anyone in Kakistocracy II.