Bill Pulte is Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The what?
If you had never heard of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—a small niche of the government that oversees much of the mortgage industry—this might be the week that put the FHFA on your radar, all because of its director, a 37-year-old official named Bill Pulte who was this week’s Washington Main Character (Non-Epstein Division).
Over the past few days, news stories have revealed a slew of criticisms and even an agency investigation into the dubious moves he has made in recent months as he has tried to ingratiate himself with President Donald Trump, including claims that he fired more than a dozen ethics staff who questioned his actions and that he presented bad ideas to the president that have embarrassed the White House.
Pulte arrived at his job running the FHFA amid a flurry of criticisms that he is both a “nepobaby” and unqualified for the job. Pulte is an heir to a real estate and construction fortune and has no professional experience in the mortgage industry he is now tasked with supervising.
Yet since taking over the FHFA this spring, he has anointed himself as something of a mortgage fraud expert, digging up old documents and using them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to California Sen. Adam Schiff and Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes to his millions of Twitter followers, before referring them to the Justice Department for investigation.
All of the people he’s accused of such crimes are prominent Democrats, even as journalists revealed that mortgage data points to similar errors committed by three GOP officials in Trump’s Cabinet.
Pulte’s claims made news—Trump even used the accusations against Cook to fire her from job at the Federal Reserve, a move she is now contesting before the US Supreme Court.
Still, though none of Pulte’s allegations became criminal charges (Letitia James is now facing a claim unrelated to what Pulte dug up), they begged the question of how Pulte was accessing the private data behind his accusations.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that an ethics team at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage giants Pulte oversees, had begun to investigate exactly this question. They started because some of their internal staff had expressed concern that senior leaders at the FHFA were pushing them to improperly access mortgage loan paperwork. The ethics watchdog then escalated their inquiry to the internal oversight office at the FHFA, who passed it federal prosecutors.
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