Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook participates in a board meeting at the Federal Reserve on March 19, 2026 in Washington, DC.
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A lawyer for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on Wednesday pushed back on President Donald Trump’s revived effort to remove her from the central bank, telling the White House in a five-page letter that allegations of mortgage fraud against her “remain unfounded and untrue.”
Lawyer Abbe Lowell’s defense of Cook came just before the deadline for a reply that Trump aide Dan Scavino set three weeks earlier, when he wrote to Cook that there is “sufficient reason to believe that you made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements.”
Trump, who wants the Fed to sharply lower interest rates, first moved to fire Cook, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, in late August 2025.
He took that step after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice accusing Cook of possible mortgage fraud, alleging she claimed two different properties as her primary residence at the same time.
Cook denied the allegations and filed a lawsuit challenging her dismissal. The Supreme Court in late June blocked Trump from firing Cook, but left the president with a path to try again to remove her.
Lowell, in his letter to White House counsel David Warrington, said that trying to fire Cook based on Pulte’s referral “would ignore the facts and the law.”
Scavino’s Aug. 5 letter to Cook describes “two acts by Governor Cook that, ‘taken together,’ supposedly constitute grounds for her removal,” Lowell wrote. “But neither of those acts shows intentional wrongdoing or amounts to a crime, and neither constitutes ’cause’ under the Federal Reserve Act.”
Lowell also noted that Trump himself, along with others in his administration including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Attorney General Todd Blanche, have reportedly also listed multiple properties as primary residences in the past.
“An inadvertent oversight is not fraudulent or criminal,” Lowell wrote. “Governor Cook’s apparent mistake on a form provided to her by her lender, which was aware of her other residences, was unintentional, not criminal, and occurred in her private capacity before she took office.”
Attempting to fire Cook on the basis of Pulte’s allegations would be selective, Lowell added, and “would raise troubling questions about why President Trump is singling out Governor Cook.”
The letter also included a declaration in Cook’s defense from Kathleen Engel, research law professor at Suffolk University Law School.
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Lowell’s letter.
