[Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and now Lisa Cook.]
What gets me, and should get you, is the flimsiness of these accusations despite how loudly they’ve been bruited about on the MAGA right as though they’re signals of profound moral turpitude on the part of the targets, and how they all originated in the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is led by Trump acolyte and sycophant William J. Pulte, in private life a big homebuilder.
The important question, in
the view of Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law, is who is driving these investigations and levying these accusations, and whether they reflect an “enemies list” Pulte has compiled on Donald Trump’s behalf. I asked the FHFA to respond to Levitin’s questions, but received no response.
...none of the public accusations from the FHFA specify what, if any, financial advantages were received by the targets.
And it’s unlikely that they’re the result of random audits of FHFA loans, as Levitin observed in relation to the Cook case.
“No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit,” he wrote. “Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook’s loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.”
[In Schiff's case, we have an FHFA memo that says as much. The order came from one of the IGs Trump installed after firing most of them.]
The Fannie Mae memo says that the FHFA inspector general demanded “the loan file and any related investigative or quality control documentation, as well as all other loans associated with...Adam B. Schiff.”
The allegations against Schiff relate to his ownership of two homes, one in Burbank and the second in the Washington, D.C., area. But his dual ownership obviously was known to his mortgage lenders, and he has said that he took the homeowner’s property tax exemption only on the Burbank property.
[For James] In all but one of several documents, she stated that the niece would live in the house; according to her lawyer, on one form she said she’d be the occupant. But the bank could hardly have been misled, given the other documents. ... One form filed in 2001 regarding a Brooklyn brownstone bought for her family listed the property as having five units, but all the other pertinent forms stated correctly that it was four units. ... And in the 1983 purchase of house in Queens, New York, James’ father identified her as his spouse, not his daughter, on one form among others that identified her correctly.
Back in 2014, David H. Stevens, a former federal housing official then serving as CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Assn., told the Washington Post that the paper file for a standard mortgage had ballooned to 200-500 pages. “The likelihood of a minor defect is almost 100 percent,” he said. That reduces the significance of the errors Pulte claims to have found nearly to the vanishing point, especially given the paucity of evidence that Schiff, James or Cook got a financial benefit from any of them.
... the law is not concerned with insignificant trifles. In the Trump case, however, [the judge] declared that Trump and his fellow defendants saved tens of millions of dollars. “The frauds found here,” he wrote, “leap off the page and shock the conscience.”
