‘YOU CAN’T DO THAT’: Blatant fraud committed by Fed Reserve governor, says FHFA director

All right, folks. Hanging in the air throughout the entire Jay Powell speech was a situation where, of course, we have Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, that she now finds herself in. When asked about this, whether he would consider firing Cook, President Trump had this to say. Take a listen. I'm going to fire Lisa Cook, the Fed governor, over her mother. I'll fire her if she doesn't resign, yeah? What she did was bad. So I'll fire her if she doesn't resign. Now to my next guest, who actually made the initial discovery of possible mortgage application fraud, FHFA Director Bill Pulte joins me now. Bill, President Trump is obviously livid about this, but he's not the only one. Walk us through exactly what Cook did. Well, we see mortgage fraud throughout the United States. It happens all the time. It's prosecuted all the time. And in Ms. Cook's case, it appears, from what we can tell, to be blatant mortgage fraud. She claimed to be living in the state of Michigan. She took out a loan. And then she went and took out another loan in Atlanta and said that both of them were her primary residence. That's a big no-no. You can't do that in our mortgage market. You have to be able to declare that it's a secondary home or an investment property. You have to fill out these applications correctly. And I don't really know why everybody's in a tiz when mortgage fraud is mortgage fraud. And to be clear, it's not everybody who's in a tiz. It's really just the media. Right. Well, yeah, obviously the media, you know, they're circling the wagons. But there was an attempt, a sort of clumsy attempt, by the Kansas City Fed president today also. Actually, you posted that it was bizarre. And Senator Mike Lee just simply said, end the Fed. So, many thought that Powell was going to come to a rescue during his speech today. I don't know. That whole thing was weird. It was weird, too, how people were saying that somehow that this was targeted. Look, we refer Republicans and Democrats together all the time. We don't look at political party when we refer people. If you commit mortgage fraud and we believe that you commit mortgage fraud, we are going to report that. We have an obligation to report it. So that's really what we're focused on. And anything that people say to the contrary is just to distract from not following the law. The threshold question, Charles, is do we have laws in this country? If we have laws in this country, they need to be followed. And so long as I'm in this seat, we're going to follow the law. Yeah, well, for four years prior to this administration, all I heard was that nobody was above the law. So, sort of ironic there. You actually say or talked about referring two more people. It sounds like high profile folks. Can I get you to give me one of them right now? No, I'm not going to be announcing who we're doing. You know, we have to be very thoughtful with when and how we go about these investigations. You know, I'd say one thing, which is this is not personal, whether it's the people that we're going to be referring this afternoon or people that we refer every week. If we see that people are doing something that is risking the system, we're going to report it. You know, my job, Charles, is to make sure that we have a safe and sound mortgage market. And when you misrepresent that you're going to occupy a home and you're not, not only are you cheating the system, but you're also causing the average person to pay more for their mortgage because the system has to price in that risk of failure for that mortgage. Because if, if the bottom falls out in the economy, how are you going to be able to afford two homes? So it's a total scam when people try to do this stuff and we're going to keep on prosecuting it. And we're not going to be intimidated by the liberal media or by some of these politicians who can't believe that they are above the law. No one is above the law. Bill, let me shift to the housing market. We got some good news on existing homes yesterday and, and you know, there was a statement associated with that that said this is the best time in a long time to go out there and start to buy a home. Of course, now you've got, it looks like Jay Powell may be shifting gears to be more accommodative. Talk to us about the state of the housing market. Well, the fed funds rate, as you know, better than anyone is at four and a half percent. Frankly, that number should be at 1%. President Trump has come in and crushed inflation. And if we have a Fed chair, hopefully we have a new Fed chair very soon. That Fed chair will be able to, in my view, really turn on the lights with regard to housing. For the last four years, it's been a dark place in housing. People couldn't afford a home. You couldn't afford a mortgage. You couldn't even qualify for a mortgage. I mean, it was crazy what's gone on, Charles, the last four years. And that's entirely because Joe Biden's inflation was out of control. So now that inflation is, is down, interest rates, which are up here, need to come and they need to match where inflation's at. And until we do that, we're going to still be struggling with these last four years of the Biden economy. Bill, thank you very, very much. And we'll be on the lookout later this afternoon for those two names. Appreciate it.