Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
William Pulte, a staunch Trump defender and the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has accused James, Adam Schiff, a California senator, and Lisa Cook, a federal reserve governor, of mortgage fraud. All three have denied the accusations and James was indicted on specious federal charges last month.
Experts have raised questions about all three referrals and see them as a thinly veiled effort by Trump to target political rivals.
After Pulte made the referrals, former agency officials and experts told the Guardian they were highly unusual. Individualized mortgage data is highly sensitive and protected. And investigations into mortgage fraud are not typically handled by the FHFA inspector general, an agency watchdog staffed with investigative agents.
Ethics and internal investigation officials at Fannie Mae, the mortgage financing provider, had received internal complaints that senior officials at FHFA had ordered employees to access the mortgage documents of James and others, the Journal reported on Tuesday. They passed on their investigation to the inspector general’s office, who subsequently forwarded it to the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. Trump installed an ally, Lindsey Halligan, in that job last month.
Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader for the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in-house band Cleto and the Cletones, has died. He was 59.
The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over funding food benefits for now as a deal in Congress to end the government shutdown appears likely to be approved.
Department of Justice officials said they’re launching civil rights and terrorism investigations into protests outside a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley campus on Nov. 10, in another escalation by the Trump administration to combat what it views as left-leaning dissenters in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.
More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war so far, Gaza health officials said Saturday, as both sides completed the latest exchange of bodies under the terms of the tenuous ceasefire.
Lithuania’s top diplomat, Kęstutis Budrys, delivered a stark message to Western allies from NATO’s eastern flank during his Monday visit to Washington: The era of self-deterrence is over.
When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.
A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.
