You may remember that I wrote back in August about the MAGA Twitter warrior and Trump’s Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte. He’d already used that job to finagle his way into becoming chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He’s the third generation princeling of one of the country’s biggest home-building companies and was actively angling to get appointed to the Fed, maybe even as chair.
Pulte was more or less openly using his office to rifle through the home mortgage paperwork of Trump’s enemies and refer them for criminal prosecution without even, it seems, the kinds of technical violations that would at least be good enough for prosecutorial harassment. You’d probably noticed that there appeared to be a mortgage fraud crime wave among the community of people who’d ever made Trump mad. The accusations may have been bogus but they generated the desired headlines.
Oddly enough, the people he referred all appear to have been able to demonstrate that the accusations — never clearly substantiated in the first place — were false. After all, you can be framed and also at least a bit guilty. People do cut corners or make mistakes on mortgage applications. And the bar is pretty low when crooked lawyers and Trump toadies are running the DOJ. So I would have thought Pulte would have been able to at least find some good technical violations. But it seems not to have been so. In any case, even that isn’t really the point. Pulte’s job is to oversee the housing market and protect the rights of homeowners. He’s used it — and its access to highly private financial data — in order to hunt Trump’s foes.
There are few people who better capture the totality of Trump’s second term. Princeling donor/centimillionaire gets a choice government appointment, exploits it with what is likely criminal conduct to curry favor with the president all to help line up more insider deals for his private interests, and all while seemingly spending most of his days pumping up Trump on Twitter. Now we learn that the purge of about a dozen ethics and oversight officials at Fannie Mae a couple weeks ago came after they started scrutinizing Pulte’s improper conduct.
