It’s been three weeks since Donald Trump, exercising a power he does not appear to have, claimed that he was firing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, effective immediately. The president’s action was based on mortgage fraud allegations raised by one of his partisan appointees. Cook herself hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing.
There’s no great mystery surrounding the motivation behind the gambit: The White House has spent the year trying to exert greater control over the Fed, and if Team Trump can push Cook out — not because of deep concerns about mortgage paperwork, but because she stands in the way of the president’s agenda — she can be replaced with a loyalist who’ll take direction from the Oval Office.
There’s no shortage of problems with this, but an especially important one emerged late last week. NBC News reported:
Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook declared in financial forms that her Atlanta property would be used as a ‘vacation home’ and not her primary residence, according to documents obtained by NBC News that appear to undercut the Trump administration’s allegations of mortgage fraud.
When Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte — recently described by The Washington Post as “a prominent Trump sidekick” — first made a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Cook, the accusation was that she’d listed two different addresses as her primary residence.
Though Cook denied the allegations and no charges have been filed, the White House used Pulte’s claims to launch an aggressive offensive against her with public condemnations from both the president and vice president.
The pretext behind the smears is that the Fed governor committed mortgage fraud, and now there’s fresh evidence to suggest she did not.
So, the administration is giving up? Of course not. The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration sought to convince a federal court on Sunday that President Trump possesses vast powers and ‘discretion’ to fire federal officials, as it raced to block Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve, from participating in this week’s meeting of the central bank.
A federal district court ruled last week that Cook can only be legally ousted for cause, and the White House has failed to meet that threshold. The administration’s lawyers have appealed that ruling, insisting that Trump’s power is “unreviewable.”
The case is now pending at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, though time is of the essence. The Times’ report added, “The Trump administration has asked the appellate panel to stay that order and rule by the end of Monday, ahead of the Fed’s two-day meeting, which begins on Tuesday.”
Again, no one is even bothering with the pretense that the administration is scrambling to oust Cook because of a desperate need for swift justice related to the mortgage bureaucracy. Rather, the White House sees an opponent that it’s eager to remove from the board. Watch this space.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
