White House Sends Lisa Cook New Letter Threatening Her Fed Job Over Mortgage Claims

The White House sent Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook a letter this week telling her Trump is "considering removing" her over allegations she lied on mortgage paperwork. It's round two of a fight that already went to the Supreme Court once.

Dan Scavino, Trump's deputy chief of staff, signed the letter dated Wednesday. It gives Cook 21 days to explain "false statements on one or more mortgage agreements," according to CNBC and Fox Business, which both reviewed the letter's language. ABC News first reported it.

This is not a new accusation. It's the same one Trump used to try to fire Cook last August, when Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte filed a criminal referral alleging Cook falsely listed two homes, in Georgia and Michigan, as primary residences and failed to report rental income on her Atlanta property. No criminal charges have been filed against Cook. This is an allegation, not a conviction, and Cook disputes it.

What the Supreme Court actually said

Trump fired Cook last summer without much process. She sued. A federal court blocked the firing while the case played out. In late June, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to keep that block in place, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion.

Roberts didn't say Trump could never fire Cook. He said Trump couldn't do it the way he tried the first time, because it denied her due process. The Court's opinion, as quoted by Fox Business, warned against letting the president "remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after." That, Roberts wrote, "would turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment."

Roberts also left the door open. He wrote that the underlying question of whether Trump has cause to fire Cook "will depend in part on the underlying facts" that haven't been evaluated yet. Scavino's letter cites that opinion directly, saying it's being sent "pursuant to the Supreme Court's opinion."

So this is Trump trying to do the thing the Court said he can eventually do, this time with the paperwork.

Cook's side

Abbe Lowell, Cook's attorney, isn't buying it. "The allegations are as baseless now as they were a year ago when President Trump tried to remove Governor Cook and interfere with the independence of the Federal Reserve," Lowell said in a statement given to CNBC and The Guardian.

"No matter what President Trump tries to do next, this much is clear under the facts and Supreme Court precedent — there is no valid cause for removing Governor Cook," Lowell added. "As we did before, we will challenge this latest pretext and preserve her position and the historic role of the Fed."

Cook and her legal team have said previously that any paperwork issues were "inadvertent" errors, and that the administration is "cherrypicking" facts, according to The Guardian. That's a real defense worth taking seriously. Mortgage paperwork mistakes, even ones involving primary-residence designations, happen and don't automatically mean fraud. Whether Cook's explanation holds up is a factual question nobody has resolved in court yet.

Why this matters beyond one governor

Cook was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022 to a 14-year term running through 2038. She's the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, previously worked on Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and taught at Harvard and Stanford. None of that is relevant to whether she lied on a mortgage form, but it is relevant to why removing her would be historic.

It's also relevant that Trump's push to fire Cook started right as he was hammering the Fed to cut interest rates. Cook backed the Fed's decisions not to cut, alongside then-Chair Jerome Powell, which drew Trump's public anger. That timing doesn't prove the mortgage allegations are fake, but it's a fair question whether a president upset about interest rate policy should get to remove a Fed governor over unrelated paperwork claims. The optics here are not great for the White House regardless of whether the underlying allegations turn out to be true.

Pulte, the FHFA director who filed the original criminal referral, has also gone after New York Attorney General Letitia James with similar mortgage-related allegations. CNBC notes Pulte has been described as an "attack dog" for Trump against his political opponents. That's a characterization, not a settled fact, but it's worth flagging as context for where this allegation originated.

What happens next

Cook has until roughly the last week of August to respond in writing to Scavino's letter. If Trump moves to fire her after that, expect Lowell's team back in federal court within days. The Federal Reserve itself declined to comment on the letter, according to CNBC. The Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits of the mortgage allegations, only on the process required to fire a Fed governor, so whatever comes next will likely turn on evidence nobody has publicly produced yet.