Bill Pulte, the Trump-appointed director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, seems to be spending most of his time trying to frame New York Attorney General Tish James for a noncrime of supposed mortgage fraud.
Pulte wants to get James because she successfully sued Donald Trump in Manhattan for the false valuation of his holdings and won a judgement against him (which is now on appeal).
Having failed to get James indicted in Virginia, where she owns a house used by her niece, Pulte is now pushing for indictments on the same weak set of facts in Chicago and Miami, corruptly using government influence.
Every attempt has stemmed from the same strained interpretation that James committed fraud in securing a loan for the Virginia house; in the first instance, a judge ruled that the charges could not be brought by Lindsey Halligan, who was illegally acting as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Then, a grand jury there declined to issue an indictment when the Justice Department tried again.
Now, Pulte wants federal prosecutors in Illinois and Florida to probe representations James made to insurance companies based in those states.
If this approach seems somewhat familiar, it might be because it often has been used to great effect, just not really in the United States. Authoritarian leaders from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have weaponized the government in just such a manner, finding whatever rationales they can to harass perceived enemies with frivolous investigations and prosecutions, even if they never really trot out any evidence.
Let’s not forget that the late Russian anti-corruption crusader Alexey Navalny was convicted not for any of his activism, but on concocted charges of embezzlement and contempt of court, some of a litany of charges Putin’s people threw at him.
James at least is a prominent elected official and has the resources to defend herself against this absurdity. Others don’t have that same platform; the government is, for example, once more making an effort to deport Kilmar Abrego García, a man whose main transgression seems to have been causing embarrassment for Trump when Homeland Security was forced to admit that it had erroneously and illegally deported him to the CECOT mega jail in El Salvador.
Even after bringing him back stateside on a federal judge’s orders, criminal and immigration prosecutors have not stopped either trying to imprison or deport him, throwing the full weight of the federal government against one ordinary man.
Whether it is James, Abrego García, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Fed Chair Jay Powell, Sen. Adam Schiff, or anyone else, the point of these efforts is not to see justice, but to make an example out of them. The messages clear; become an inconvenience or an enemy of the administration, and you will not be left alone.
If any one case is thrown out, Trump’s allies will just try again, hooking onto any conceivable excuse until both your will and your resources are depleted. The truth is, you can find some plausible impropriety for pretty much everyone in the country if you really go fishing for it, and that’s enough.
Bill Pulte’s third effort to go after N.Y. AG must fail
