LOL: Bill Pulte ‘Examined’ Todd Blanche’s Mortgages

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Pass the Popcorn, Please

Bill Pulte — Trump’s posterboard-carrying golden retriever — didn’t just abuse his office as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to gin up mortgage fraud cases against Trump foes. He also reportedly used it to target one of his rivals in the administration: Todd Blanche, who is now attorney general.

The comical new report from the Wall Street Journal — the substance of which Pulte denies — is the latest log on the fire of the rivalry between Pulte and Blanche. Rivalry may be overstating it somewhat, considering Pulte’s far lesser position in government. It’s more a classic case of someone who shouldn’t be in the Oval Office having the ear of the president and feeding him wild ideas, conspiracies, and other nonsense, way outside of their lane. That in turn forces other officials to respond to crazy orders from the White House.

Blanche had to deal with all manner of mortgage-driven nonsense coming from Pulte via the White House. Not that Blanche is an innocent. He was deputy attorney general when the bogus mortgage fraud prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James was launched. That indictment was dismissed when Blanche’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan as the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia was found by a judge to be unlawful. A subsequent effort to re-indict her was rejected by a grand jury.

In addition to James, Pulte had also referred to the DOJ mortgage fraud cases against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook. But this is the first reporting Pulte had examined Blanche’s mortgage, too. Think of it as tarring a rival for presidential attention at the very moment they were clashing over the viability of the mortgage cases.

“Some officials believed Pulte had been trying to collect information on Blanche and others to undermine them and pressure them to more quickly pursue the investigations,” sources told the WSJ.

It’s not clear if Pulte’s reported examination of Blanche’s mortgage (which, again, Pulte through his lawyer denies having done) came before or after DOJ investigated whether Pulte inappropriately shared information about the DOJ investigation into Schiff.

Pulte apparently didn’t come up with much on Blanche, who, according to DOJ, has a single mortgage of his own and cosigned a home loan for his son.

Amusingly, the administration circled the wagons in response to the WSJ report: “Representatives for FHFA and the Justice Department said the story was an attempt to drive a wedge between Blanche and Pulte.”

A Real Concern for Susan Collins

ProPublica: The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

GOP Senator Wants Don Jr. Investigated

Citing a Russian oligarch paying for Don Jr.’s wedding party, Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) has asked Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to investigate “the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access by domestic and foreign interests.”

Before you get all excited that a single GOP senator is finally seeing the light … Curtis’ letter to Grassley is filled with false equivalencies and Biden-bashing. Among other things, Curtis also wants Grassley to investigate Hunter Biden.

Still, a sitting GOP senator comparing Don Jr. to Hunter Biden suggests the political winds are shifting.

Blast From the Recent Past

Ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony to the Jan. 6 House committee still reverberates four years later.

Yesterday, a federal judge in D.C. handed a defeat to former Hutchinson attorney Stefan Passantino in his defamation lawsuit against former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Andrew Weissmann.

Hutchinson famously testified that Passantino, who had previously been a Trump I White House lawyer, told her that she could tell investigators she didn’t recall even if she remembered some but not all of the details of Jan. 6.

Weissmann would later describe Passantino in a September 2023 social media post as a lawyer “who coached [a witness appearing before Congress] to lie.”

In ruling in favor of Weissmann’s motion for judgment on the pleadings, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan wrote (citations removed):

The transcript, far from contradicting Mr. Weissman’s statement, supports it. Ms. Hutchinson’s statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie. For example, Mr. Passantino’s advice included telling Ms. Hutchinson that “Your go-to, Cass, is ‘I don’t recall,’” even when she asked about answering “certain questions that [she] would recall.” (emphasis added. When Ms. Hutchinson told Mr. Passantino, “I’m f[*]. I just lied,” Mr. Passantino purportedly responded, “You didn’t lie. . . . They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.” He concluded, “You’re doing exactly what you should be doing.” In other words, the transcript reflects that even as Mr. Passantino nominally instructed Ms. Hutchinson not to lie, he repeatedly urged her to say “I don’t recall” based on the unverifiability of that response—not based on its truth. He encouraged her to say “I don’t recall” whenever the Committee would not know the difference, even when Ms. Hutchinson indicated to him that she did in fact recall relevant information.

Legal ethics complaints against Passantino in Georgia and D.C. were dismissed in 2024 after Hutchinson declined to cooperate with those investigations.

Blame Natalie

CNN: “President Donald Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp showed him clips of media coverage last week before he banned Politico, CNN and MS NOW from the White House, people familiar with the matter said.”

ICE Shooting Victim Has Bullet in Back

The DoorDash driver shot Sunday by ICE in Austin, Texas, was treated at a local hospital but quickly turned over to federal agents with a bullet still lodged in his back, his lawyer reports.

Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, who remains in ICE custody, felt well enough to call in to a press conference his lawyer held yesterday where he said the bullet was too close to his spine for doctors to remove.

Garcés Perez was not a target of ICE during the operation in which he was shot, the NYT reports.

Mass Deportation Watch

• The Deportation Project, a consortium of two dozen media organizations coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories, interviewed more than 100 people to compile the most comprehensive account of Trump’s third country removal policy.
• AP exclusive: Last week, ICE began removing detainees who are subject to final orders of removal from its publicly available online detainee locator system, making it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them.
• A federal judge in Alabama has temporarily blocked ICE from entering private job sites without a warrant, doing roundups without suspicion, and detaining people who show proof they’re in the country legally, Courthouse News Service reports. The order came in a case brought by a construction worker who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was twice detained on the job last year during immigration enforcement actions.

8th Circuit Does Some Real 8th Circuiting

After the Roberts Court properly cleaned up the GOP-created redistricting morass in Missouri, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in an indefensible ruling yesterday stirred the pot one more time, ordering the state to use the new GOP friendly congressional map in the midterm elections.

BUT … nearly every sober-minded legal expert expects the Roberts Court to make quick work of this flawed decision and restore the old map.

Not Normal in Germany

German leaders are preparing to deny the far right Alternative for Germany party access to a secret war plan for another Russian attack in Eastern Europe — because they fear AfD might pass the plan to Russia.

I’m Of Two Minds About This ..

When I first saw the headline — “Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds” — I expected it to be a less-than-scintillating scientific categorization issue about what makes organs technically distinct from each other. But it’s quite a bit more interesting than that.

The research, published last week in Nature Neuroscience, suggests two different but related bases for how the fore/midbrain came to be distinct from the hindbrain:

• “From the earliest moments of embryonic development … the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain.”
• Researchers studied the evolutionary record and found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and acorn worms, whose common ancestor with humans is the jellyfish, which have two nervous systems at different ends of their body.

“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” said Kyle Loh, an associate professor of developmental biology at Stanford. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

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