Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s legal team has fired back against the White House, rejecting accusations of mortgage fraud that President Donald Trump claims justify her removal.
Cook’s attorney Abbe David Lowell sent a letter to the White House stating that “Governor Cook has never committed mortgage fraud or any intentional wrongdoing, and there is no legally cognizable cause for removing her from the Federal Reserve Board.”
Lowell addressed his letter to White House counsel David Warrington, arguing that firing Cook based on the referral “would ignore the facts and the law.”
The rebuttal described the case against Cook as relying “on untried and unproven allegations of criminal wrongdoing,” characterizing the push to remove her as legally and factually unsound.
Trump has been attempting to remove Cook for more than a year in what is widely regarded as an unprecedented assault on the Federal Reserve’s institutional independence.
It marks the first time a sitting U.S. president has tried to remove a central banker since the Fed was founded more than a century ago, raising serious concerns among economists and legal scholars.
The effort would allow Trump, who has long publicly pushed for lower interest rates, to install a replacement more sympathetic to his preferred monetary policy direction.
The mortgage fraud allegations against Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, were initially raised last August by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte.
Pulte published a letter on X on August 20 accusing Cook of falsifying bank documents and property records to obtain a “more favorable” mortgage by improperly designating her primary and secondary residences on a home loan application.
Cook’s attorneys noted that Trump called for her removal on Truth Social roughly half an hour after Pulte’s social media post went live, suggesting the process was politically coordinated rather than legally grounded.
The attorneys argued in a 31-page filing that Cook was denied proper due process and never received an opportunity to address the allegations before Trump moved against her.
Lawyers also noted that the alleged inconsistencies in Cook’s property records had already been disclosed during her vetting process before she was confirmed to the Fed board in 2022.
Cook has denied any wrongdoing and has framed the removal effort as a pretext driven by disagreements over monetary policy, filing a lawsuit to defend her position on the board.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow her removal in a 5-4 ruling that protects Fed officials from being fired at will by a president, though the case was returned to a lower court.
The Supreme Court’s decision left open the narrower question of whether any proven wrongdoing could potentially serve as legal cause for termination, keeping the dispute active in the courts.
Cook has not been charged with any crime related to the mortgage fraud allegations, and she has continued serving in her role as the legal battle moves forward.
Pulte has made similar mortgage fraud accusations against several prominent Democrats, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff of California, and California Representative Eric Swalwell.
