Trump To Fed Governor: Resign Now Or Be Fired Over Fraud Claims

President Donald Trump said Friday that he would fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook if she doesn’t resign over mortgage fraud allegations. 

Cook, appointed to the Federal Reserve by former President Joe Biden, has faced pressure from the Trump administration to step down after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte — an ally of Trump — urged the Justice Department to investigate alleged mortgage-residence misrepresentations by Cook. 

“I’ll fire her if she doesn’t resign,” Trump told reporters on Friday morning. “What she did was bad so I’ll fire her if she doesn’t resign.”

Trump first called for Cook to step down on Wednesday, shortly after Pulte publicized an August 15 letter he sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi alleging that Cook falsified documents to get better loans and interest rates. 

Pulte alleged that Cook simultaneously claimed primary residency for two homes—one in Michigan and one in Georgia — in order to secure more favorable mortgage rates. He wrote in his letter that Cook “falsified bank documents and property records to acquire more favorable loan terms, potentially committing mortgage fraud under the criminal statute.”

In a statement, Cook said that she learned of the criminal referral through the media and that she had no plans to leave her position at the Fed. 

“I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet,” she said. “I do intend to take any questions about my financial history seriously as a member of the Federal Reserve and so I am gathering the accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts.”

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Trump has repeatedly clashed with the Fed over its reluctance to lower interest rates and has previously floated firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Cook, who is slated to stay at the Fed until 2038, has backed Powell’s decision to hold interest rates steady.

Last year, The Daily Wire and City Journal conducted an investigation into Cook’s academic record and found that, in several papers, she had lifted language from other scholars without proper quotations, and repeatedly republished text from her own prior work — or that of coauthors — across multiple academic journals without adequate attribution.

For example, in a 2021 paper titled “The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names,” Cook copied and pasted verbatim language from Charles Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett, without using quotation marks when describing their findings, as required.

Much of Cook’s academic work also focused on race activism rather than quantitative economics.