Trump Vs Schiff

[ZiprHead]

Trump’s Vile, Corrupt Attack on Adam Schiff Is Already Backfiring

The real potential scandal in the Schiff mortgage story isn’t his conduct. It’s Trump’s—and that of his bureaucratic loyalists.

newrepublic.com

This week, President Donald Trump raged on Truth Social that Senator Adam Schiff is guilty of “Mortgage Fraud,” and demanded that he be “brought to justice.” The basis for this claim: Fannie Mae has made a criminal referral to the Justice Department involving several properties owned by the first-term California Democrat.

Many stories on this dutifully reported Trump’s allegations of corruption, and then followed up with Schiff’s response: That the charges are bogus and constitute retribution against a longtime Trump critic who argued the case for his impeachment in the House during his first term.
This framing makes it a story about Schiff’s conduct. But the real story here is Trump’s conduct. It’s how this allegation came to be in the first place. It’s the role that Trump and/or the White House played in getting the federal bureaucracy to arrange events to the point where the president of the United States could pronounce a sitting U.S. senator and political enemy a target for potential prosecution. Understood this way, the story is likely a dry run for much more like this to come.

The unnerving outlines of that story are already visible. The allegations, in a nutshell, are that Schiff falsely designated his Maryland home in the suburbs of Washington D.C. a primary residence even as his real primary home is in California. This allegedly secured Schiff a cheaper mortgage.

But where did the allegation initially come from? A Los Angeles Times reporter obtained a memo authored by the Fannie Mae Crimes Unit and sent to the head of the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), which oversees the government-backed Fannie Mae. The memo lays out the basis for those charges, but as the Times piece on this reports, the memo nowhere says that Schiff committed “fraud,” as Trump claimed.

Even more interestingly, the memo also says this inquiry resulted after the FHFA’s office of inspector general (OIG) made a “Document Demand” from the Fannie Mae Crimes Unit—a demand for documents related to “all” loans “associated with” Schiff.
Experts in how inspectors general function said in interviews that this chain of events seems unusual and troubling. The FHFA inspector general obviously investigates mortgage fraud, they noted, but they asked how—and why—this inspector general might have come to make this specific request involving this specific U.S. Senator’s loans.

“From beginning to end, this process is highly irregular,” Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who’s still well regarded by government insiders, told me.

Making this stranger, these issues involving Schiff have been aired before, during his 2024 Senate campaign, when multiple of Schiff’s Fannie Mae loans and residences came to light. As CNN reported at the time, his spokesperson argued that it was appropriate to describe both residences as primary because they both function that way for the Schiffs (and also to distinguish them from a vacation home).
The Fannie Mae memo itself is squirrelly with its charges. It claims that Schiff “possibly” misrepresented his homes on multiple loans. Read through Trump’s whole tweet on this and it’s clear that someone or other created a tidy package of these charges and handed them to Trump—or whoever wrote this tweet—to translate into this missive. How did that happen?

Experts also point out that the memo shows that the response to the inspector general’s request was forwarded to the head of FHFA—William Pulte, a Trump political appointee and loyalist.

“It is extremely unusual for the response to any IG document request to go to the head of the agency rather than back to the OIG—I have never heard of that,” Bromwich told me. “So far as I know, it is unprecedented for such raw information to be forwarded to the White House. Responses to OIG requests simply don’t go to the White House—ever.”

Trying to railroad Adam Schiff.