“Unprecedented and Illegal”: Lisa Cook Sues Trump—and Jerome Powell

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Donald Trump is seeking to fire in an escalating campaign of lawfare against his political enemies, is officially taking the president to court.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Fed board member says Trump’s “concocted basis” for her removal fails to “amount to ‘cause’”—and is an “unprecedented and illegal” violation of her due process rights as well as the central bank’s independence.

Stunningly, the lawsuit also names Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the Board of Governors as defendants.

Trump on Monday fired Cook over (seemingly vengeance-driven) accusations of mortgage fraud. The lawsuit, however, says the allegations are “pretextual, in order to effectuate her prompt removal and vacate a seat for President Trump to fill and forward his agenda to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Cause, under the Federal Reserve Act, means “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But even if Trump’s authority to remove a Fed board member goes beyond that, Cook’s lawyers state, he is not allowed to “unilaterally redefine ‘cause’—completely unmoored to caselaw, history, and tradition—and conclude, without evidence, that he has found it.”

“Certainly,” the suit continues, “a policy dispute between the President and a Governor does not constitute ‘cause.’ Neither does a specious assertion that a one ‘potentially’ committed a crime—one which is unproven, uncharged, and unrelated to official conduct.”

So expansive is Trump’s “conception of ‘cause,’” Cook warns, that “it would allow him to remove any Federal Reserve Board member with whom he disagrees about policy based on chalked up allegations.”

The lawsuit also notes that Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has lobbed accusations of mortgage-related misdeeds against others of late (i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James). Notably, Cook’s lawyers note, each of Pulte’s criminal referrals have been “at one time or another, political targets of President Trump’s ire prior to any mortgage fraud allegations.”

This fact has caused suspicions that Pulte is working through an enemies list—perhaps even handed down from the White House. And, as TNR’s Greg Sargent observed this week, the discovery process in Cook’s case against Trump could help reveal potential White House involvement.

This story has been updated.

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with boos and jeers for supporting President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.

The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County, where Iowans urged Hinson to “stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.

“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “For who? For you?”

“Cost of living is higher than it’s ever been,” another woman said.

Hinson, a former TV journalist, has been remarkably unpopular at town halls across her state as she ardently defends Trump’s agenda. She faced even more heat in May when she told a crowd in Elkader that she was “proud to vote for President Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill’,” eliciting so much contempt from the crowd that they yelled at her until she stopped speaking.

“You are a fraud,” a constituent shouted at her at the time.

Hinson isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman faced outrage last week for supporting Trump’s tariffs, New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, which combined with voters’ simmering resentment for lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

Republicans were advised earlier this year by party leadership to avoid engaging in town halls, since the format would give voters the opportunity to voice their disagreement with Trump’s policies.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley faced a similarly explosive town hall in April, when he was pressed to defend the president’s flippant attitude toward the Supreme Court when he defied an order related to Kilmar Armando Ábrego García.

Voters blew up at him again the following week in Northwood. Grassley hasn’t hosted a town hall since.

The evening after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a “simple” solution that, in reality, would have done nothing to prevent the tragedy earlier that day.

“School shootings are preventable, and simple, basic, common-sense actions can mitigate these tragedies,” Hannity told his audience. “If we have the desire to stop school shootings, this is the first thing you should do: Every school in the country should have a metal detector. You have them at airports. You have them when you’re around elected politicians.”

It’s unclear what a metal detector would have done to prevent Wednesday’s shooting, in which the perpetrator opened fire from outside of the church, through its windows.

According to the Minneapolis police chief, “the gunman approached on the outside, on the side of the building, and began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass” inside.

Citing a parent who was in the church as the shooting took place, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the “shooter opened fire outside the building with some kind of semiautomatic weapon.” The unnamed eyewitness said the perpetrator “just pepper-sprayed through the stained-glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots.”

Hannity went on to recommend controlling “the entry of kids and the perimeter around every school,” and placing armed retired servicemembers or law enforcement officers in schools.

“The left’s rush to immediately blame Republicans, race to blame guns, for every tragedy, it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s predictable,” the Fox host concluded—himself racing to blame anything but firearms for what took place Wednesday, to the point of espousing a woefully inadequate solution that could have never stopped it.

Tulsi Gabbard’s title of Director of National Intelligence becomes more ironic everyday.

Gabbard reportedly shocked Central Intelligence Agency officials last week after she revoked an undercover operative’s security clearance and posted their name on social media, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials who had been involved in producing intelligence assessments related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. She claimed to have done this at the direction of President Donald Trump.

The director was apparently unaware that the CIA officer she doxxed had been working undercover, according to one person familiar with the events. Three other people said she did not adequately confer with the CIA about the composition of the list, but delivered the list to the CIA the evening before she posted it to social media.

ODNI did not seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA was not made aware of her intention to post it on X, according to two people familiar with the events.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff at the CIA, told the Journal that the intelligence director had made a stupid mistake.

“A smart [director of national intelligence] would have consulted with CIA,” he said. “It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk.”

Gabbard has dug into a months-long campaign to discredit an intelligence community assessment that found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had aspired to see Trump enter the White House, over Hillary Clinton. (Putin later admitted as much.)

Gabbard also recently announced plans to gut ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

This is another ironic move from Gabbard, who has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself.

In a remarkable development following Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ouster of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, four other high-ranking officials have reportedly resigned.

Letters from three of the officials have been publicized thus far, and their messages include warnings that the agency’s mission has been compromised under RFK Jr.’s stewardship, with anti-vaccine policies and other growing misinformation.

The outgoing officials are Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry; Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases; Dr. Daniel Jernigan, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases; and Dr. Jennifer Layden, director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.

“For the good of the nation and the world, the science at CDC should never be censored or subject to political pauses or interpretations. Vaccines save lives—this is an indisputable, well-established, scientific fact,” Houry wrote in an email to her colleagues. She added that “the overstating of risks and the rise of misinformation have cost lives,” citing a spike in measles as well as the August 8 shooting at the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters.

“My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud,” Daskalakis wrote in his resignation letter, which he shared on X. “I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health.” He cited, among other agency actions, changes to the vaccine schedule for children and adults and the administration’s “efforts to erase transgender populations.”

“Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated and is derivative of a legacy that good medicine and science should continue to shun.”

Jernigan also informed her colleagues that, “given the current context in the Department, I feel it is best for me to offer my resignation.”