By Marisa Taylor and Chris Prentice
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump appointee accusing the president’s political foes of mortgage fraud skipped over his agency’s inspector general when making criminal referrals, according to seven people familiar with the matter, bypassing rules meant to ensure that federal officials don’t abuse their power for partisan purposes.
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, earlier this year made criminal referrals against targets including Lisa Cook,
the Federal Reserve governor whom President Donald Trump has tried to dismiss, for alleged crimes related to their mortgages. Breaking with standard procedures, Pulte circumvented that agency’s internal watchdog, typically the office that would make such referrals, by asking the Justice Department to investigate Cook and two other prominent officials.
“The referrals did not come from the OIG,” one of these people said, using shorthand for the office of the inspector general. “It took people there by surprise.”
Cook has denied Pulte’s accusations.
Pulte didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.
Spokespersons for the Justice Department and the FHFA inspector general’s office declined to comment. The White House press office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Pulte’s accusations are at the center of ongoing efforts by the Trump administration to seek criminal charges against perceived foes of the president’s politics and policies. The campaign last month led to a criminal indictment against a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In Cook’s case, the Trump-Pulte effort has been criticized by legal experts as a move to oust a senior policymaker from the Federal Reserve – an independent institution critical to the U.S. economy that the president has increasingly sought to bend to his will.
Trump has argued the investigations are focused on “justice,” not political targets. “It's about justice, really,” he told reporters, following the indictment of the former FBI director. “It’s not revenge.”
By appealing directly to the Justice Department and publicly airing accusations that had not fully been investigated, Pulte broke with decades of precedent and ethics regulations, the people familiar with the matter said. Five of these people, and independent legal experts consulted by Reuters, said Pulte’s moves defied so-called “impartiality” regulations, among other rules meant to prevent political witch hunts.
“You can’t single out people for prosecution for political reasons,” said Richard Painter, a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush and that administration’s top ethics attorney. “It’s a clear violation of federal law.”
Pulte’s actions, legal experts told Reuters, violate various ethics norms and regulations. In addition to “impartiality” rules designed to ensure government officials remain unbiased in decisionmaking, the experts said it could flout the agency’s own procedures, protections under the Privacy Act, and the constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.
Because ethics rules can be subject to interpretation and to an administration’s willingness to enforce them, however, it’s unclear whether Pulte’s actions will undermine his accusations of mortgage fraud or affect his authority as agency director. Trump himself has praised Pulte, lauding him in one social media post, writing: “DON’T LET THE RADICAL LEFT WEAKLINGS STOP YOU!”
The president’s push to target political opponents with criminal prosecution has intensified. In late September, a grand jury indicted James Comey, the former FBI director and longtime object of Trump criticism, in an alleged perjury case. The indictment arrived shortly after Trump in a social media post called on the attorney general to prosecute him.
Comey has denied any wrongdoing.
The investigation of Cook comes as Trump seeks a more pliant Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank. Although the Fed has long operated free of political meddling, Pulte has joined Trump and other administration officials in criticizing its governors and calling for them to cut interest rates more aggressively. The Supreme Court last week declined to allow Trump’s dismissal of Cook, suspending the matter until it can hear full arguments in the White House’s bid to remove her.
Almost immediately after his March confirmation at the FHFA, Pulte became an outspoken voice of the administration. The FHFA is a low-profile agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to oversee elements of the mortgage-lending sector.
Within months of his arrival, its new chief was aggressively attacking Cook. In August, citing alleged irregularities in her mortgage paperwork, Pulte publicized his request that the Justice Department investigate the Fed governor, targeting her on social media and accusing her of “blatant mortgage fraud.”
To ensure the independence of probes such as those initiated by Pulte, legal experts said, the politically appointed head of a federal agency would typically ask an inspector general to investigate alleged wrongdoing. At many federal agencies, the office of inspector general exists to independently investigate fraud, waste and abuse.
Any evidence obtained during a probe would then be referred to criminal investigators by the inspector general, not the agency head. In no circumstances, these experts added, would the officials involved be expected to publicize an investigation, disregarding any presumption of innocence and potentially tainting the possibility of a fair trial.
“One indication that the criminal mortgage referrals were political in nature is that the referrals were released publicly,” said Andrew Tessman, a former federal prosecutor in Washington and West Virginia who investigated mortgage fraud cases. “That would never happen that way before.”
Shortly after taking the helm of the FHFA, Pulte set up a new channel to receive anonymous tips about mortgage fraud. The agency would welcome tips from “anyone and everyone,” he wrote in April on X, the social media site. The new tip line puzzled some staff, six of the people familiar with the matter told Reuters, because the agency already had such an outlet, overseen by the inspector general’s office.
Reuters couldn’t determine whether Pulte, by establishing a new channel outside the department that historically probed mortgage fraud claims, planned from the start to avoid the inspector general. The earlier tip line, like the office of the inspector general itself, had been established by design to remain free from interference even by agency staff, three people familiar with its workings said.
In addition to his campaign against Cook, Pulte made similar criminal referrals against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff. Trump called on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute James, Schiff and Comey in a Sept 20 Truth Social post.
James and Schiff have denied wrongdoing.
None of the referrals has led the Justice Department to announce any criminal indictment. The federal prosecutor overseeing the James investigation resigned in September after Trump publicly said he’d lost confidence in him.
Since Pulte made the referrals, according to documents reviewed by Reuters, officials from the FHFA and other federal agencies have collaborated with the Justice Department in the ensuing probes. The officials have included representatives from the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the inspectors general’s office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the documents show.
Spokespersons for the FBI and IRS didn’t respond to requests for comment. An automated email from the HUD inspector general’s office said the office is closed because of the ongoing government shutdown.
Last month, Reuters reported that the mortgage paperwork associated with one of Cook’s residences showed that she had declared an Atlanta residence to her lender as a “vacation home.” The declaration appears to counter other documentation cited by Pulte suggesting that Cook, in an alleged bid to secure better lending terms, had declared the home her primary residence.
(Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch. Editing by Paulo Prada.)
