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For all his Trump-deranged bravado, Democrat Senator Adam Schiff, the notorious Russia-hoaxer, looked like a frightened rabbit caught in the spotlight Sunday morning when he appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to deny the mortgage fraud scandal that has embroiled him.
He should be nervous.
A grand jury in Maryland is weighing criminal indictments for Schiff over alleged mortgage fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud and false statements to financial institutions that were uncovered by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, claiming he certified both a Maryland property and a California condominium as his primary residence for tax and mortgage purposes.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and at least two other unnamed people are facing similar allegations, which carry potential jail terms up to 30 years.
“It’s patently false and the president knows it,” blustered Schiff, claiming FHFA head Bill Pulte was “essentially doing the president’s bidding against me, against Letitia James [and] against this person on the Federal Reserve.
“Mortgage is their new weapon to go after their critics.”
However, Schiff’s attempts to dismiss the allegations against him as “retribution” or part of a campaign of “lawfare” by an “authoritarian” president are not only hilariously hypocritical but miss an important point.
‘A serious crime’
Mortgage fraud is a serious matter that affects us all.
Banks offer significantly better rates and require smaller down payments for primary residences because they deem them lower risk than investment properties since homeowners are less likely to default on the home they live in.
If enough people falsely claim investment properties as their primary residence, lenders inadvertently carry higher risks that could see the collapse of the entire financial system, as happened in the 2008 global financial crisis, when widespread fraud and inadequate regulation led to a wave of defaults.
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It’s no small crime, and those Trump critics who pretend it is trivial and commonplace have short memories and low ethics.
Pulte, a Trump appointee with deep expertise in housing finance, is quite properly focused on cleaning up the industry.
“Mortgage fraud is a serious crime,” Pulte told me, promising it will “be nearly eliminated after we’re done.”
His crusade to root out fraud, waste and unethical conduct in the housing finance system is to ensure the stability of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee about half the country’s residential mortgages.
Pulte notes that the mortgage fraud case he referred to the DOJ against Lisa Cook is especially significant because “the very person entrusted with setting interest rates should never manipulate them for personal gain.”
It’s significant in another way too, because it plays into Trump’s power struggle with Jerome Powell.
The independent Federal Reserve chairman has stubbornly refused to cut interest rates, citing inflation concerns, earning the wrath of President Trump, who points out that the Fed was happy enough to adjust rates to Joe Biden’s political benefit, including by a half percentage point seven weeks before the 2024 election.
Flipping the balance
If Cook, whose term is not up until 2038, is forced to resign over the mortgage fraud allegations, Trump will be able to appoint a governor of his choice to replace her, thus flipping the balance of the Fed in his favor, 4-3, and putting the heat on Powell. (Another Biden appointee, Adriana Kugler, resigned unexpectedly this month.)
Cook, like Schiff and James, denies Pulte’s allegations that she falsified documents to claim two properties — a house in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a condo in Atlanta — both as her primary residence, giving her more favorable mortgage terms.
She mentions the purchases predate her 2022 appointment to the Fed’s seven-member Board, one of four diversity appointments made by Biden as part of his peculiar obsession with identity politics above all.
The investigation is understood to include questions over whether she misrepresented her mortgage situation to the board when she was being vetted.
After Pulte tweeted a copy of his criminal referral letter about Cook to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Special Attorney Ed Martin last week, Trump took the opportunity on Truth Social to demand that she “resign now!!!”
Pulte responded on X that “the President has great cause to fire Lisa Cook” and alleged that Powell might “be complicit with Cook’s alleged fraud.”
In an extraordinary puff piece over the weekend, The New York Times framed the allegations against Cook as a racist anti-DEI purge against the first black female Fed governor, decrying “attacks [that] focused on her property ownership given that Black Americans were nearly 40 percent less likely than white Americans to own homes.”
The Times also referred to Cook’s “best-known academic paper [that] showed how lynchings and other violence against Black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries reduced the number of patents they filed.”
The relevance escapes me.
Cook is either guilty or innocent of mortgage fraud, and the color of her skin is irrelevant, just as Schiff and James’s guilt or innocence has nothing to do with how much they hate Trump.
No mercy from Don
But the fact is that if high-profile Democrats have been dumb enough or crooked enough or arrogant enough to flout the law, they can hardly expect to find mercy from Trump who, after all, suffered through 91 felony indictments from three Democrat prosecutors, aimed at throwing him in jail and off the ballot, not to mention James’ $500 million civil suit aimed at destroying his company, an absurd penalty which a New York appeals court threw out last week.
That was just in five months in 2023, during his second presidential campaign, and came on top of a relentless campaign of lies and character assassination, including Russiagate and two impeachments, that crippled his first presidency.
Just to remind us of those travails, Sunday was the second anniversary of Trump’s famously defiant mug shot, when he had to surrender at Fulton County Jail in a Georgia election interference case led by Democrat district attorney Fani Willis — who incidentally ended up being thrown off the case in her own sordid scandal.
Trump has framed the mug shot from the cover of the New York Post and it sits in pride of place at the entrance to the Oval Office, for all to see and marvel at his endurance.
Did Trump’s antagonists never expect a boomerang?
If they’ve done nothing wrong, they will be exonerated.
But, as they like to say: “No one is above the law.”
It never gets old.
It’s hard to know why James Comer is being coy about subpoenaing Kamala Harris to testify before the House Oversight Committee about Joe Biden’s cognitive state during his presidency.
Few people had a better opportunity to observe Biden’s decline at close hand and behind the scenes than his loyal vice president.
She joined him for his presidential daily briefing, appeared with him at public events, and at the start of his presidency, she used to have weekly lunches with him in the small dining room off the Oval Office. You’d think she’d have an idea why they petered out,
It is the vice president’s constitutional duty to step in if the president is unable to fulfill his duties.
From what we saw with our own eyes and have learned since his disastrous debate performance last year, Biden was in no shape to be president for at least part of his term, so what went wrong with that failsafe mechanism?
The American people are owed an explanation about why Harris didn’t invoke the 25th Amendment and whether there was ever any consideration of it by the Cabinet.
Chairman Comer is right that it will “haunt” her political career, but he should insist that she testify immediately.