The Attack Dog Targeting Trump Opponents Over Their Paperwork Hasn’t Even Filed His Own

Lisa Cook and Bill PulteMother Jones illustration; Mark Schiefelbein; Drew Angerer/Getty

For the past month, Donald Trump has been trying to fire Lisa Cook—a renowned economist serving as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors—over claims that she committed mortgage fraud. Trump’s attempt ended up before the Supreme Court, where last month lawyers for the administration told the justices that Cook’s firing is merited because she committed “financial misfeasance^[2].”

In fact, Cook has not been charged with any crime—and additional loan documents show that the alleged fraud was instead probably a clerical error^[3]. Yet the administration has doubled down, framing it as “potentially criminal” and termination-worthy, ever since it was first raised by a Trump official who runs a small federal agency: Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) head Bill Pulte.

Pulte, a construction heir and longtime Trump donor, published screenshots of Cook’s mortgage applications on X in August^[4] and has issued similar attacks against several other Democrats, suggesting that imperfections in their mortgage loan documents were evidence of fraud or willful misconduct. Now, Mother Jones has learned that Pulte himself committed an error in his own financial filings—the same kind of mistake that he has used to attack Trump’s political rivals.

The error stems from Pulte’s unprecedented move in March^[5] to make himself chairman of the boards of government-controlled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Together, these two entities service nearly half of American mortgages, and they’re overseen by the FHFA, Pulte’s agency. 

Pulte’s new roles on the Fannie and Freddie boards meant that he was required to file something called a “Form 3” with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that oversees publicly traded companies. The SEC requires that all new officers at public companies file this form within 10 days^[6] of starting their position, even if they own no shares of the firm. Pulte did file a Form 3^[7] within 10 days of joining the board for Freddie Mac (and declared that he has no ownership of any Freddie shares) but has yet to do so for Fannie Mae—putting him in violation of securities law, according to two experts who spoke to Mother Jones.

Joan Heminway^[8], a law professor at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law who specializes in securities regulation, confirms that directors like Pulte must file a form even if they have zero ownership of any shares of the firm.

“To me this is a no brainer,” she said. “It is required.”

The FHFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment to this story.

New directors are required to file Form 3s even if they own no shares because they serve as a check to regulate insider trading. Board directors often get key information about a company’s steps before the public does. That’s why the Form 3 tells the public what, if anything, the new director owns before they first start their job: It establishes a baseline for the future, because if they make new trades while still serving as a company director, they must report those too.

Assuming Pulte has not traded shares of Fannie Mae while he’s been a director, Heminway says the missing filing is not likely to lead to enforcement action by the SEC, and that Pulte could take corrective action and file the form late.

Meanwhile, Pulte has treated the filing errors of Trump’s political rivals with a lot more severity. In August, he told his 3 million X followers that Cook had designated two homes as her primary residence at the same time to get lower interest rates—posting a side-by-side screenshot of her mortgage applications, under an all-caps banner: “FRAUD AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE.” He added that he was using this information to recommend that Cook be criminally prosecuted by the Department of Justice. “No one is above the law,” he wrote.

Pulte’s hard stance has proven useful to Trump, who immediately used it to issue a letter firing Cook “for cause.” This is the only legal way a president can fire top officials at the Fed, whose independence from politics is a staple of the US economic stability. Firing Cook would present an opportunity for Trump to appoint a loyalist in her place and to gain more influence of the central bank.

In the spring, Pulte also sent criminal referrals for mortgage fraud against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully prosecuted Donald Trump and his businesses for millions of dollars worth of financial fraud. This week, a Trump-appointed prosecutor charged James with mortgage fraud. The transactions that Pulte highlighted in his referral were not the ones in this week’s indictment, but the charges mark an escalation of what he began: Prosecutors had previously investigated^[9] the claims he made against James and concluded there was no case. What’s more, the Associated Press recently reported^[10] that Pulte has a long history of issuing blistering attacks against those who have slighted him: He tried to depose his aunt in a lawsuit, called a relative a “fat slob,” and when he lost his board seat on his grandfather’s company, he accused his grandfather’s widow of insider trading.

As my colleague Dan Friedman and I reported last month^[11], Pulte has had previous paperwork errors. He got his job in the administration after his wife donated $500,000 to a super-PAC backing Trump, just as Trump’s reelection campaign was struggling to get off the ground following the January 6 insurrection. The donation came through a Delaware shell company and was eventually investigated by the Federal Election Commission. The agency said that^[12] Bill Pulte had not broken the law, but it did find that his wife had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family.

ProPublica^[13] also found that at least three Trump Cabinet members have done what Cook is accused of—claiming primary residences on different mortgages. They noted that this is often something that lenders select on loan forms, and that borrowers then sign without noticing while going through piles of paperwork. In other words: These are common human errors, far from willful lies or criminal acts.

In Cook’s case, that appears to be what happened: In at least two other records^[14], Cook had designated one of the homes as a second home, not a primary, suggesting that her lender may have mistakenly designated the vacation home as a primary residence when filing her paperwork.

Pulte’s missing filing is likely a similar mistake. “This is probably a glitch, and Pulte probably thought he had done both,” Heminway says of his missing Fannie Mae Form 3. “It somewhat puts the filing lapses on equal footing in that, in both cases, it probably will turn out to be a technical error that created the noncompliance.”

Often, the determining factor for prosecuting such oversights is whether they’ve benefited the person who made the error, or if the lack of disclosure has somehow hurt the public. One could argue, Heminway says, that Pulte’s error might be more significant than Cook’s. In her case, the primary residences were reported, even if in error. But in Pulte’s case, there was simply no information reported at all.