I’m by no means the first one to note this. But it’s so important that I want to make sure it’s at the top of your mind. Have you noticed that out of the blue all of Donald Trump’s enemies seem to be getting investigated for mortgage fraud? Letitia James, Adam Schiff and now Fed Board member Lisa Cook; and it’s the pretext for her purported firing by President Trump?
Well, it turns out there’s a reason. Bill Pulte is Trump’s Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an agency created as part of the Global Financial Crisis reforms. From that post he finagled his way into being the head of Fannie Mae and Sallie Mae, the quasi public institutions which back a huge percentage of American home and student loans.
This is a kind of out of the way appointment, the administrator of an agency that oversees the housing market. You’d expect the person to have a relatively low public profile. But that’s not the case here. Pulte is heir to one of the biggest residential home building companies in the US. He’s also believed to be angling for his own appointment to the Fed. (Residential housing heir in charge of mortgage rates … what could go wrong?) He is also a full-time Twitter warrior on behalf of Donald Trump. Pulte has more than 3 million followers on Twitter, which if you’re not familiar with these things is a huge, huge number. By comparison, the President’s extremely online son, Don Jr., has just 5 million. So Pulte is federal housing loan administrator by day, MAGA Twitter warrior/influencer by night. And in fact, if you look at the date-stamps, he’s that by day as well.
Each of these investigations and more have originated with Pulte.
Put the pieces together: as Director of the FHFA and the two Fannies, Pulte has access to the financial data of virtually everyone in the country. You need to have gotten a home mortgage or a student loan of course. So it’s not literally everyone. But obviously that covers quite a lot of people. And, critically for him, it covers probably literally everyone in public life.
The process goes like this. Pulte clearly has a Trump enemies list. Whether he gets directed explicitly by the White House or just knows on his own what’s wanted really doesn’t matter. He sifts through everyone’s mortgage records, finds something that he claims is evidence of fraud and immediately makes a referral to the DOJ. Now it’s a “federal investigation.” From there he heads on to Twitter and announces that James or Cook or Schiff is guilty of mortgage fraud and under investigation. He goes beyond that and starts selectively releasing documents on Twitter or making claims about their guilt.
We tend to think of the weaponization of federal government power as mostly centering on the Justice Department. But as you can see here, that’s hardly the case. It is a glaring example of the rules of the road under the second Trump administration. All the powers of the state are unleashed against the people who displease the president. Full stop.
It’s worth noting that every target of Trump’s degenerate ‘justice’ does not need to be squeaky clean. It’s possible one of these people has some discrepancy in some mortgage paperwork. But that’s hardly the point. The Trump system is impunity for friends and infinite scrutiny for adversaries. In the case of Lisa Cook it hardly matters if there’s anything really wrong with one of her mortgages. He’s clearly happy to release anything on Twitter regardless of the rules. And so far it’s been innuendo and inconclusive documentation at best. But Pulte and Trump don’t care about that. They want her seat on the Fed board. That’s all that matters.
That’s the system we’re now living under. It’s operating in the open. You should know about it.