President Trump’s attacks on Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve Board governor battling in the courts to keep her job, are part of a growing effort to undermine his perceived political rivals by accusing them of an obscure type of mortgage fraud.
But the crime Mr. Trump alleges, which involves claiming falsely that a second home or rental property is a principal residence in hopes of obtaining more favorable financial terms, is often hard to prove and rarely prosecuted, according to mortgage experts and criminal defense attorneys.
A New York Times review of mortgage documents connected to more than 80 senior government officials, including cabinet members, Mr. Trump’s staff, Supreme Court justices and House and Senate leaders from both parties, found only a handful of examples in which officials declared two primary residences. Those examples are not exact parallels to Ms. Cook’s case, and each of those officials offered an explanation for the circumstances — or documents — showing they acted properly. But they show how mortgage cases can become clouded or confusing because of paperwork errors, extenuating circumstances or other factors.
Primary-residence borrowers are typically required to move into their properties within 60 days of the mortgage’s issuance and to stay there for at least 12 months, unless prompted to move by a life situation — which could be any number of factors, from a new job to a divorce, according to mortgage documents, real-estate lawyers and other industry experts.
Most of the public officials identified by the Times review as having potentially violated those terms have pointed out that paperwork errors or other mitigating circumstances accounted for the appearance that they had obtained a primary-residence loan whose occupancy terms they did not honor. Many say that, in fact, their intentions had been clearly communicated all along— mirroring an argument made by Ms. Cook’s lawyers.
Mr. Trump has sought to justify his attempts to fire Ms. Cook from the Federal Reserve Board — and the powerful central bank committee that sets domestic interest rates, which he wants to lower — by claiming that she took out primary home loans on a pair of properties in different states almost simultaneously, in an attempt to game the system by locking in lower mortgage rates.
Ms. Cook, who has sued Mr. Trump over his efforts to dismiss her and remained on the board Monday after a federal appeals court ruled in her favor, has denied wrongdoing. And newly disclosed records reviewed by The Times and reported earlier by Reuters suggest that one of the loans underpinning Mr. Trump’s claims was always intended for a vacation home, contrary to the accusations from the president.
Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who led Mr. Trump’s first impeachment hearing and who is another target of Mr. Trump’s fraud accusations, penned a letter years ago to his lender stating that he had received permission from a congressional committee to use his Washington area home as a primary residence for insurance purposes, even though his “principal legal residence” was in California, according to the review by The Times.
And Mr. Trump has alleged that New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, committed mortgage fraud by claiming in a 2023 legal document that a home in Norfolk, Va., that she helped buy with a niece was her principal residence — in hopes, the president has said, of obtaining a better mortgage rate. Yet just weeks before the deal closed, Ms. James wrote to her lender that “this property WILL NOT be my primary residence.”
Despite their objections to the accusations, all three officials have been referred by William J. Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to the Justice Department for potential criminal charges. “When someone commits mortgage fraud, they undermine the faith and integrity of our System,” Mr. Pulte wrote on social media about Ms. Cook. “No one is above the law.”
Over the weekend, after Ms. Cook’s newly disclosed documents were first reported, Mr. Pulte wrote in a social media post: “If Dr. Cook solicited estimates as a vacation home and then entered into a mortgage agreement as a primary residence, that is extremely concerning, and in my opinion, evidences further intent to defraud.”
Experts say it is far more complicated to prove that borrowers had bad intentions, even if they declare in mortgage documents that they would occupy two primary homes in two different places.
“Who’s to say what really was the motivation behind this?” said Clifford Rossi, a business professor at the University of Maryland who once oversaw risk management for Citi’s consumer lending practice. “If the box was clearly checked as owner occupant when it was not, then it’s like a he said, she said. Why was that done? Was it done in a malicious way to avoid a higher fee or was it just an honest mistake?”
The Times review found that senior Republicans and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle had also occasionally obtained more than one primary-residence loan in relatively quick succession, though each with documents or explanations asserting they acted properly.
For instance, public real estate records appeared to show that Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee, had declared primary residences in both Tupelo, Miss., and Alexandria, Va.
But Mr. Wicker’s office provided The Times with private loan application documents showing that he had actually attested that his Alexandria property, like another unit he owns in the same building, was to be used as a second-home investment property.
The public records on file with the county, which he signed in 2006, appeared to have been mistakenly prepared by the mortgage agent without the necessary caveats.
A spokesman for Capital One, which bought the bank that Mr. Wicker used for his 2006 mortgage, said the senator filled out his original paperwork properly to indicate that his home was an investment property and was given the proper terms and rates despite the error.
Mortgage experts interviewed by The Times said that even in cases where primary residences appeared to shift over relatively short periods of time, actual fraud, which requires showing intent, was rarely found.
Just 412 fraudulent mortgages — a broad category that can include a range of misleading actions, from amplifying one’s income to deceiving a lender about a primary residence — were found by investigators at Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored entity, for the year 2024. (Fannie Mae, like its sister entity Freddie Mac, buys home loans from lenders and packages them into new securities, which it sells to investors. As of last September, Fannie Mae owned or guaranteed a quarter of the outstanding mortgage loans or assets in the United States.) Occupancy fraud, the intentional misstatement of a primary residence in order to obtain a financial advantage, is not even the most common mortgage fraud, Fannie Mae data shows. False income claims are.
Real estate and criminal defense lawyers said the many credible explanations borrowers might offer for having dual primary residences, and the incidence of truly bad actors who take out primary-residence loans simply to flip or rent out a property, meant that cases like Ms. Cook’s were hardly worth the time.
“If the government pursued all of these — and I’ll call them application peccadilloes — there wouldn’t be any room in all the prisons for people who do this,” said Stanley Brand, a criminal defense attorney who is a distinguished fellow in law and government at Penn State Dickinson Law.
Ms. Cook was a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University when she obtained what appeared to be primary-residency loans in Michigan and Georgia during a two-week period of 2021, documents show.
One loan was a refinancing of her primary home in Ann Arbor, Mich., said a person with knowledge of her situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter. The other, this person said, was the purchase of a second home in Atlanta, where Ms. Cook was raised and still had family. The second home was mislabeled on a mortgage document at the time, the person added. It was characterized differently in a lender record from before the deal’s closing that described it as a “vacation home.” A separate government document, dated late that year, called the property a “second home.”
Mr. Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, provides another example.
In January 2021, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, took out a mortgage for refinancing a home in Happy Valley, Ore., located in a congressional district that she was elected to represent two years later. She attested in mortgage documents that it would be her principal residence for at least one year. But just two months later, she and her husband bought another house on the outskirts of Phoenix, records show, and took out a primary residence mortgage on that house, as well.
Courtney Parella, a Labor department spokeswoman, said that Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her husband had refinanced their home in Oregon and then subsequently decided to retire in Arizona. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer then unexpectedly decided to move back to Oregon while her husband moved forward with pursuing residency in Arizona, Ms. Parella added. The couple both voted in Oregon a year later, according to the county elections office.
Ms. Parella said that Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her husband followed the law and complied with all ethical obligations.
Ms. Chavez-DeRemer’s mortgages were previously reported by ProPublica. Ms. Parella called them “a nonstory invented just to attack the Trump administration.”
Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Schiff, who was elected to the Senate last year after more than two decades representing the Los Angeles area in the House, misled his lenders in a series of home loan transactions between 2009 and 2012. During that time, Mr. Schiff repeatedly maintained that a home in Potomac, Md., was his primary residence, according to mortgage documents, even as he bought a condominium in Burbank, Calif., that he also stated was a primary residence. Mr. Schiff has denied misleading his lender about his residences, and said he had long maintained two primary residences because of his work, which requires both a home in California and a place to live near Washington.
Mr. Pulte, Mr. Schiff said in a recent interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is “essentially doing the president’s bidding against me” and other political opponents like Ms. James and Ms. Cook. “Mortgage is their new weapon to go after their critics.”
Ms. James was accused by Mr. Pulte of mortgage fraud in several matters, including in the purchase of the Norfolk home in 2023. Ms. James declared on a power-of-attorney document that August that she intended to occupy the home as her principal residence, according to the document. But in fact, it was her niece, Shamice Thompson-Hairston, who planned to live there — a fact that Ms. James had stated in a note to the lender shortly before the deal closed in 2023. Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, said in a letter to the Justice Department earlier this year that the occupancy assertion had been made “mistakenly” and referred to Mr. Pulte’s allegations against her as “improper political retribution.”
A set of transactions undertaken by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, provides a rough analogy. In 2018, she obtained a primary-residence loan on a home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. But 15 months later, along with her daughter Caroline Wiles, she took out a second primary-residence mortgage on a different home in the same city.
Because it had been more than a year since Susie Wiles obtained the first mortgage, it was permissible for her to take out another mortgage, real-estate experts said. The experts added that it was common for older, wealthier relatives to obtain mortgages as co-borrowers for younger relatives who intend to live in the properties.
“Susie didn’t buy it for herself,” said Jim Heitzer, the loan officer who handled the deal for Ameris Bank. “She was a non-occupant co-borrower, which means the income is used for somebody else, but the primary residence is Caroline’s.”
Caroline Wiles, a lobbyist in Florida, still lives in the area with her four golden retrievers, according to a corporate biography of her. In an email, she wrote, “I do co-own the home with my mother.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a statement to The Times that “Trump administration officials mentioned in this story have followed the law and are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”
Mimi Dwyer contributed reporting from Los Angeles.