Mother Jones illustration; Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP; Aaron Schwartz/Pool/CNP/Zuma
Donald Trump is attempting to seize control of the historically independent Federal Reserve by firing one of its leaders. Not the chair, Jerome Powell—at least not yet. Instead, the president has set his sights on another member of the Fed’s board: economist Lisa Cook, who Trump claimed in a Monday night social media post had committed mortgage fraud.
The president’s move against Cook, who has not been charged with a crime, was enabled by Bill Pulte—the 37-year-old head of the little-known Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte recently charged in a post to his 3 million X followers that Cook had designated two homes as her primary residence at the same time—posting a side-by-side screenshot of her signatures on two mortgage applications, under a banner reading: “FRAUD AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE.”
The effort marked the latest bid by Pulte—whose aggressive social media efforts have earned him the moniker of “mini-Trump”—to weaponize his job running an agency that oversees the quasi-governmental mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has anointed himself as a sort of national mortgage fraud sheriff, devoted to harassing Trump political foes over alleged misstatements in mortgage applications, and asking the Justice Department to investigate them.
But Pulte’s attacks on Cook—along with his similar barrages against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—invite scrutiny of his own past dealings.
The heir to a real estate and construction fortune, Pulte got his job in the administration about three years after his wife, Diana Pulte, donated $500,000 to a super PAC backing Trump. The donation was channeled through a Delaware shell company, ML Organization LLC, that Bill Pulte controlled. It came at a crucial moment, as the former president was just beginning to get his new campaign off the ground following his reelection defeat and the 2021 Capitol insurrection.
This opaque gift drew a complaint from a watchdog group alleging that Pulte violated campaign finance laws by obscuring the source of the funds. A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation concluded only this year, when the FEC quietly announced that the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose that Diana Pulte was the real source of the money. The agency said that Bill Pulte had not broken the law, and it did not accuse Diana Pulte of wrongdoing.
“The FEC looked at the issue and determined that there was no violation by Director Pulte,” an FHFA spokesperson told Mother Jones. “He was 100 percent compliant. Anything else is Fake News, an attempt to smear Director Pulte and distract from serious mortgage fraud. SAD.”
Pulte did not respond to questions about why the donation went through a shell company, if he was involved in the donation credited to his wife, or whether the large donation helped him land his job in the administration.
He also has not addressed an FEC determination that the “contributor” of the funds—Diana Pulte—had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family. That looks like the same kind of paperwork sloppiness—in information ultimately provided to the federal government—that Bill Pulte is now harassing Trump foes over.
“I am extremely skeptical that Bill Pulte would come across 1/100th as well as Lisa Cook if his paperwork were scrutinized as closely as he has scrutinized Cook’s paperwork,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the nonprofit Revolving Door Project, which tracks executive branch appointees it says fail to serve the broad public interest.
A New York judge ruled in 2023 that Trump himself had committed major mortgage fraud by inflating the value of his real estate holdings and other assets, in a case prosecuted by James’ office. An appeals court last week threw out a $550 million civil fine against Trump but left in place the underlying finding of fraud, which Trump is appealing.
As Trump touts untested fraud allegations—ones dwarfed by the large-scale fraud he was found liable for—the president appears to be suffering few consequences. But Pulte’s sudden prominence has put the FHFA director under the microscope.
He faces mounting congressional and media scrutiny over his actions at FHFA and his qualifications for the job, which include little housing policy experience beyond working on the board of the private construction company launched by his grandfather. Aside from that, Pulte’s work previously focused on running his private equity firm and on trading so-called meme stocks.
Pulte’s financial disclosures show that he is worth about $200 million, much of that through his ties to the real estate market, including as a managing member of the Pulte Family Office, a fund that often invests in construction and building. (Pulte said he would step down from this position after confirmation to the FHFA; it is unclear if he’s done so.) The lower interest rates Pulte and his boss are demanding from the Fed would likely boost the real estate sector, including Pulte’s own holdings.
Hauser, of the Revolving Door Project, said that while those business holdings might not trigger ethics alarms for a regular FHFA director who confined himself to running that agency, Pulte’s role is unique. “Because Pulte is involving himself in the Federal Reserve policy as if he is a member of the Fed,” Hauser argued, ethics officials should think “far more broadly about what his work is and what conflicts he has.”
In a letter last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, took aim at Pulte’s focus on assisting Trump’s efforts to control the Fed. Warren noted that Pulte had posted about Powell 114 times between July 1 and July 20—all while making little progress on problems, like housing affordability and homeownership access, that are in his agency’s purview. Amid a housing price crisis, falling home construction, and other economic problems worsened by Trump’s tariffs, she wrote, Pulte has not offered plans for addressing the national housing shortage.
The work Pulte has done at FHFA has also generated controversy. His job involves overseeing the government-controlled mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which traditionally operate quasi-independently. But Pulte in March named himself as chairman of the boards of both companies and ousted various board members, the CEO of Freddie Mac, and other top officials.
Pulte is now involved in an administration plan to sell stock in Fannie and Freddie. Such a move would mean subjecting these government-owned entities to the profit pressures of publicly traded companies, which could make housing and mortgages even less affordable for average consumers. According to Bloomberg, Pulte’s championing of Trump’s attack on the Fed may be helping the FHFA director regain influence over that planned public offering that he lost amid administration infighting.
Pulte’s growing chorus of critics are also questioning how he obtained the mortgage data he has leveraged against Cook, Schiff, and James. If he has been using his authority to request that the companies he oversees—Fannie or Freddie—pull the past mortgage loan files of political enemies, this would be an unprecedented move by an FHFA director.
Pulte has denied that he’s done this, instead claiming he is overseeing a general crackdown on mortgage fraud. He said recently that he had “brought in Palantir,” the data-management contractor founded by Peter Thiel, to review “the data set of loans from Fannie Mae” to look for mortgage fraud. He has also claimed that the allegations about Cook resulted from “a tip that we received,” while declining to elaborate.
Yet the only claims of fraud that Pulte has publicized so far are aimed at Democrats in Trump’s crosshairs. His calls for them to be investigated have been quickly taken up by Ed Martin, the far-right former “Stop the Steal” organizer now running the DOJ’s so-called “Weaponization Working Group” that is targeting Trump critics.
Pulte has not explained why he appears to be focused solely on Democrats. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Pulte has ignored Ken Paxton, the Trump-allied Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate who appears to have taken out mortgages on three properties, each of which he identified as his primary residence.
Pulte “seems to be going through the enemies list to see, ooh, can he find any place in a complex mortgage document where he alleges someone has said something that doesn’t entirely add up,” Warren said Wednesday on MSNBC. He “is out there trying to engage in a political hit job, and this just happens to be the data that he has access to.”
Adam Levitin, a Georgetown law professor, argued recently that Pulte’s focus on three prominent Trump targets suggests the director “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,” Levitan wrote.