Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is fighting to stay on the job, and she’s blaming a clerical mistake, not fraud, for the mortgage form issue now being used by President Donald Trump to try and fire her.
That’s the core of a lawsuit Lisa filed this week in federal court, directly challenging the president’s legal authority to remove her from the Fed Board.
The case doesn’t spend much time discussing whether she actually filled out the mortgage application wrong. Instead, it hammers the claim that even if she did mess up, it still doesn’t give Trump the legal right to fire her.
One of the filings in Lisa’s lawsuit says the issue might have come from a paperwork mistake. Her legal team insists this does not rise to the level of “cause,” the only justification the Federal Reserve Act allows for firing a sitting board member.
That term has no clear legal definition and might now have to be interpreted by the Supreme Court. Lisa says this entire mortgage fraud accusation is just a distraction meant to hide what’s really happening: a push by Trump to stack the Fed Board of Governors with people who will support his demand for rate cuts.
Lisa’s lawyers say Trump has no legal basis
The lawsuit calls the mortgage fraud claims “pretextual” and says they are based on conduct that allegedly happened before Lisa was even confirmed by the Senate. It argues that no federal agency has ever investigated or proven anything about the claim.
“This allegation about conduct that predates Governor Cook’s Senate confirmation has never been investigated, much less proven,” her legal team wrote. “This allegation is not grounds for removal under the [Federal Reserve Act].”
The complaint says even if a mistake was made, it wasn’t serious enough to meet the legal bar required to fire a Fed governor. Trump and Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have accused Lisa of giving false information about where she lived when applying for federally insured mortgages.
But her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, fired back in the complaint, saying that even if the president had tried to hide his real reason for firing her, the excuse he cooked up still doesn’t qualify as valid under the law.
“Even if the President had been more careful in obscuring his real justification for targeting Governor Cook,” Abbe wrote, “the President’s concocted basis for removal, the unsubstantiated and unproven allegation that Governor Cook ‘potentially’ erred in filling out a mortgage form prior to her Senate confirmation, does not amount to ‘cause’ within the meaning of the FRA and is unsupported by caselaw.”
The filing also points out that neither Trump nor Bill ever claimed Lisa benefited personally from the alleged clerical error, or that it was done intentionally. Her lawyers added, “Even if Governor Cook had committed the infractions that the President alleges, which she did not, the President would lack ‘cause’ to remove her.”
Critics question silence as markets stay calm
Bill responded in a statement to Scott Wapner of CNBC, saying, “In her filing, Ms. Cook does not deny that these are her mortgage documents, so one has to wonder why she, or [Fed Chair] Jerome Powell, would want this to be a part of the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to have preeminent integrity and which is critical to the safety and soundness of the U.S. Mortgage Market.” His statement questions why Lisa didn’t directly challenge the documents or give an explanation.
While all of this unfolds, the markets have mostly brushed it off. But that could shift. Krishna Guha, who leads global policy research at Evercore ISI, warned that the legal drama is distracting from what he calls the “Trumpification” of the Fed. “We have no privileged knowledge of the legal facts,” Krishna said in a note this week, “but believe if it were established Cook committed even accidental mortgage misrepresentation, she would have to go.”
If Trump gets his way and Stephen Miran is confirmed by the Senate to fill an open seat, he will hold a 4–3 majority on the Fed board. That could grow to 5–2 if Jerome decides not to complete his term as governor after his current run as chair ends in May 2026.
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