If Trump has a smoking gun in the Lisa Cook mortgage fraud case, we haven’t seen it yet

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook is accused of falsely claiming two homes as her primary residence to secure better mortgage terms. But documents reviewed by CNN show that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer did the same — taking out two mortgages in one year, appearing to list both homes as primary residences.
Yet Cook is the only one under investigation by the Trump administration for mortgage fraud.
On paper, the mortgage documents may seem to raise red flags, since a borrower isn’t supposed to hold two principal-residence mortgages at once. But while their situations differ, all three deny wrongdoing, and each has evidence to back their claims, including documents suggesting Cook told her lender one property was a vacation home, not a primary residence.
With assistance from Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Palantir’s artificial intelligence, the administration has combed mortgage records to lodge fraud allegations that seemingly target political opponents: Pulte has also called for mortgage fraud investigations into Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.
In Cook’s case, the scrutiny falls on a Federal Reserve Board governor, a position Trump has sought to influence in his push to lower interest rates.
Labeling a property as a principal residence when taking out a home loan can provide the borrower with a lower mortgage rate or a smaller required down payment. But only one home can qualify at a time, unless there are extenuating circumstances, such as relocating for a new job. Intentionally claiming otherwise means misleading the lender and breaking the terms of the loan agreement.
According to a CNN review of publicly available county documents, Cook took out two mortgages in close succession in 2021. First, in June, for a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then, in July, with a separate lender, for an Atlanta condo. The mortgages contain nearly identical language, requiring the borrower to promise they would live in the home as a “principal residence for at least one year after the date of occupancy, unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing.”
That wording isn’t unique to Cook’s home loans. It comes straight from the standard forms developed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which most lenders use for conventional mortgages.
Pulte has seized on that language to accuse Cook of fraud, leading to her firing by Trump last month. Cook has pushed back in court, and after a judge temporarily reinstated her, the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.
Bessent’s vacation homes
Bessent, Chavez-DeRemer and Cook each had different circumstances, but taken together their cases show that the public record offers only a partial view, making it nearly impossible to know from county documents alone whether fraud occurred.
In 2007, while living in New York City, Bessent took out two mortgages on the same day, both for vacation homes. One for a home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and one for a home in Bedford, New York. Each of the loans was over $10 million.
The county mortgage documents for both homes, which are publicly available and were viewed by CNN, state that each home would be a primary residence for at least one year, unless the lender agrees otherwise.
However, there was a key difference between Bessent’s mortgages and Cook’s: Bessent had the same lender, Bank of America, for both loans.
It is unclear why Bessent’s mortgage paperwork mentioned the homes would be designated as primary residences. Representatives for Bessent provided CNN with a statement from Bank of America stating that it was “well aware” that both homes would be used as secondary homes. The statement also said that for the mortgage product Bessent received, interest rates for both loans would not have changed if the home was used as a primary residence or a secondary residence.
CNN also viewed a nonpublic loan application and an undated rider that seemed to show that Bank of America had known that Bessent’s homes would be secondary residences.
New documents may reveal information Cook shared with her lender
It is unclear whether Cook had similar nonpublic disclosures, but an unofficial loan estimate for Cook’s Atlanta condo, first reported by Reuters but viewed by CNN, shows that Cook’s lender may have been aware that the home was a secondary property after all.
In May 2021, less than two months before Cook signed a mortgage agreement on her Atlanta property, the document from Cook’s mortgage lender, Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union, listed the property’s use as a “vacation home.” Bank-Fund Staff Federal Credit Union did not respond to a request for more information.
Patrick Delahunty, a former federal prosecutor who now works as an attorney focused on white-collar criminal investigations and is not connected to any of the officials mentioned in this story, said that in determining whether fraud was committed, it is essential to consider what the lender knew.
“The bank needs to know what the risk profile is on the loan. It’s a safer loan if it’s a primary residence than a secondary residence,” Delahunty said. “If the bank knew one way or another that the property was going to be used as a secondary residence or a vacation home, that’s really what matters, because they would have known how to assess the risk of the loan and what interest rates to offer.”
On social media, Pulte argued that the existence of such a loan estimate document doesn’t clear Cook’s name, though.
“The fact that Lisa Cook may have had a loan estimate with a so-called vacation home, and then took out a primary mortgage, I believe shows further intent to defraud,” he wrote last week.
Cook’s attorneys said the government was disregarding facts in her case.
“The government continues to ignore the facts that have been publicly reported on and cited in our briefs that refute their allegations against Governor Cook,” Cook’s lawyers said in a statement provided to CNN last week. “The attempt to remove Governor Cook is based on cherry-picked social media posts from the FHFA Director that collapse under basic scrutiny.”
Change of plans for Chavez-DeRemer
Like Cook, Chavez-DeRemer took out two loans in 2021, according to publicly available documents viewed by CNN. Both of Chavez-DeRemer’s mortgages included a clause stating that the homes were to be principal residences – nearly identical language to that in Cook’s and Bessent’s mortgage agreements.
Courtney Parella, a spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer, said the Labor Secretary and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. In March, the couple decided to retire and purchased a home in Arizona, intending to make that their primary residence instead. However, Chavez-DeRemer got a call to run for Congress in Oregon later that year, which delayed her retirement. The spokesperson said that Shawn DeRemer “continued to move forward with the process of becoming a legal AZ resident.”
Delahunty said that a change in a person’s employment situation, leading them to change their primary residence, can be permissible under the law.
In a mortgage fraud case, “the government has got to prove that not only was your statement false, but you knew at the time that you made it, it was false, and you did it for the purpose of concealing and deceiving,” Delahunty said. “Mistakes are not crimes. It has to be an intentional falsehood.”
In a statement, Parella, the spokesperson, called Chavez-DeRemer’s two mortgages a “non-story.”
“It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind – trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense. They followed the law and complied with all ethical obligations,” she said.
No criminal complaint filed against Cook
In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Trump’s Cabinet officials fully complied with the law.
“President Trump’s incredible Cabinet officials mentioned in this story, like all Administration officials, take their legal obligations seriously and fully comply with all legal and ethical obligations, unlike Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who has been credibly accused of mortgage fraud,” Rogers said.
Like Bessent and Chavez-DeRemer, whose explanations for why their mortgages were legal could not be found by simply searching on county databases, as Pulte seems to have done, Cook may have hers, too.
The Trump administration has not filed a formal criminal complaint against Cook – so, if it has hard evidence that she intended to commit mortgage fraud and should be fired from her role at the Fed, it remains out of public view.