Bill Pulte Sued for Breaking Law to Help Trump Target His Enemies

Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell is suing the Trump official who referred him to the Department of Justice alleging mortgage and tax fraud. 

Swallwell sued Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday for violating his privacy and First Amendment rights. Earlier this month, Pulte referred Swalwell to the DOJ, claiming that the California congressman may have made false or misleading statements in loan applications. 

In his lawsuit, Swalwell claims he is being targeted for his “political views and expression” and that Pulte improperly used information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in his referral letter to the DOJ. Swalwell alleges that Pulte invaded his privacy by digging into his financial records and violating the Privacy Act, calling his actions “a gross abuse of power that violated the law.”

The lawsuit further claims that the same day Pulte sent the letter, detailed allegations against Swalwell showed up in news reports and right-wing social media accounts in what looked like a coordinated leak by Pulte and the FHFA. 

“Since Pulte took office in March 2025, FHFA has never issued a criminal referral to DOJ alleging mortgage fraud by anyone who supports President Trump but has referred four of President Trump’s political foes,” the lawsuit notes.

The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to use mortgage fraud to prosecute the president’s enemies. New York Attorney General Letita James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Senator Adam Schiff have all been targeted with similar allegations. James’s case was thrown out on Monday after the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was found to have been improperly appointed.  

Swalwell’s lawsuit now puts Pulte and Trump on the defensive, and may also help his own campaign for governor of California. Will it also thwart Trump’s attempts at revenge? 

Child trafficking arrests have hit their lowest point in five years since Homeland Security aggressively reoriented its attention toward immigration arrests.

Fewer kids have been rescued from exploitation and trafficking this past year than at any point since the pandemic, reported The New York Times Tuesday.

The number of indictments for child exploitation crimes fell by 28 percent compared to last year, according to the Times, which noted that agents that have historically participated in child exploitation investigations have resorted to working those cases in their personal time.

Fewer victims have been assisted, as well. Homeland Security agents “identified or rescued roughly 300 fewer child victims, a 17 percent drop,” according to an internal report by Homeland Security Investigations.

The data is a peek behind the curtain of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, which has apparently prioritized political results over pressing public safety concerns: For months, Attorney General Pam Bondi has impressed that the administration’s immigration sweeps would target violent criminals and child molesters—but the numbers show that hasn’t been true.

The latest data report from ICE revealed that 40 percent of immigrants detained at the agency’s facilities have no criminal record at all. Meanwhile, actual child exploitation cases are apparently falling by the wayside.

Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota: 3,000 arrests per day, per Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s demands.

The digits come at a particularly bad time for Trump, who is in the throes of a national fixation on the most damning scandal of his political career: his cozy relationship with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The White House axed 1,353 positions from the State Department in July, gutting parts of the agency that failed to align with MAGA values. Those included offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.

The cuts reduced the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months prior, thanks in large part to State Secretary Marco Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, Mother Jones reported at the time.

Twenty states are suing the Trump administration over cuts made to funding for housing the homeless.

A coalition of 19 attorneys general and two governors made the move Tuesday to seek a court order that would block “cuts and illegal new conditions” to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which works with local organizations to connect unhoused people with resources and housing.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that more than half of the program’s 2026 funding for permanent housing will be cut and reallocated to temporary transitional housing with work or service requirements. The new conditions will also allow HUD to deny funding to any organizations that acknowledge transgender or nonbinary people.

This month, HUD instituted a cap on the amount of its program funds that can go to permanent housing at 30 percent. Previously, no cap existed, and 90 percent of its funds supported permanent housing.

The lawsuit argues that the conditions placed on the program are “unlawful and unconstitutional” because the funds were mandated by Congress to be distributed based on need. New York Attorney General Letitia James, the coalition’s leader, said in a press release that “communities across the country depend on Continuum of Care funds to provide housing and other resources to our most vulnerable neighbors.”

“These funds help keep tens of thousands of people from sleeping on the streets every night. I will not allow this administration to cut off these funds and put vital housing and support services at risk,” James said.

At a time when the country is in the midst of a housing crisis exacerbated by the Trump administration, these cuts will make things even worse if they are allowed to stand. Americans who end up losing their homes already have a tough time getting assistance. If this lawsuit doesn’t stop or slow the administration’s cuts, Americans without homes will get even less from the government.

Kash Patel’s days as FBI director may be numbered. 

MS NOW reported Tuesday that President Trump is considering firing the embattled director as his errors pile up. Three anonymous sources told MS NOW that Patel had drawn Trump’s ire for his presumptuous social media posts during ongoing cases, using a government jet for a date night with his 27-year-old girlfriend, and assigning a SWAT team for her security detail. 

Andrew Bailey, the FBI co–deputy director, is reportedly Trump’s top choice to replace Patel.  

The White House responded to the reports. “President Trump has assembled the most talented and impressive Administration in history and they are doing an excellent job carrying out the President’s agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “FBI Director Patel is a critical member of the President’s team and he is working tirelessly to restore integrity to the FBI.”  

This isn’t the first time Patel’s FBI has witnessed rumors of internal upheaval. Just last month, Patel reportedly angered FBI leadership when he fired at least 30 bureau agents for being hostile to conservatism or Trump. And in October, he pissed off Trump and Justice Department officials by posting that the “FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack” on Halloween, despite the fact that no charges had been filed and local police didn’t have any details. 

Back in July, deputy director and former MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino was so upset with how Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi handled the release of the Epstein files—from Bondi claiming that she had them on her desk to her then claiming the case was closed—that he skipped work, no call no show. 

It seems clear that Patel is working on borrowed time. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that one of the most underqualified FBI leads in recent memory can’t seem to avoid these screw-ups.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump is already making light of his administration wrongfully deporting immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Speaking from the newly paved Rose Garden Tuesday, Trump delivered a ghastly joke while he passed out pardons to two turkeys, Gobble and Waddle.

“Instead of pardons, some of my more enthusiastic staffers were already drafting the paperwork straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador,” Trump said. “And even those birds don’t want to be there, you know what I mean.”

Unlike his many other groan-worthy jokes, this one didn’t seem to elicit the slightest laugh from the White House audience.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses, even though the vast majority of those immigrants did not have criminal records. Despite the administration’s claims that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, most of which were minor offenses such as traffic violations. The Trump administration has continued to refer to CECOT as part of a barbaric propaganda campaign to scare immigrants.

Since that scandal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only continued its trend of targeting immigrants who aren’t criminals. The latest disclosure from ICE revealed that 40 percent of immigrants detained at agency facilities had no criminal record at all.

Trump also cracked multiple jokes about presidential pardons, saying former President Joe Biden had “used an autopen last year for the turkey’s pardon.”

“So I have the official duty to determine, and I have determined, that last year’s turkey pardons are totally invalid,” Trump continued.

He also claimed he’d wanted to call the birds Chuck and Nancy, after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “But then I realized I wouldn’t be pardoning them, I would never pardon those two people,” Trump said.

It seems that Gobble and Waddle should count themselves lucky. They’re probably the first recipients of Trump’s presidential pardons who didn’t have to help make him rich.