WASHINGTON — The White House indicated on Tuesday that it would not back down in its fight to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve, after an appeals court rejected a last-minute attempt to remove her before a meeting to set interest rates.
An administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Justice Department would challenge the ruling soon at the Supreme Court, but the timing remained uncertain. The Fed’s two-day meeting begins Tuesday.
On Monday evening, a panel of judges blocked President Donald Trump from proceeding with his plans to fire Cook over allegations that she engaged in mortgage fraud. The decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the ruling of a lower-court judge, who temporarily prevented Cook’s ouster while the two sides warred over whether Trump had the legal authority to remove the Fed governor.
The president and his top aides claim that Cook falsified records and wrongly designated multiple homes as her primary residence to obtain favorable loan terms in 2021, before she joined the Fed. But recently revealed documents have cast doubt on those assertions. They suggest that Cook was forthright about one of the residences, a condominium in Atlanta, which she designated as a vacation property, according to records viewed by The New York Times.
If the White House had prevailed this week, it would have prevented Cook from participating in the Fed’s meeting and casting a vote on interest rates. Trump has demanded lower borrowing costs and attacked the Fed for keeping those rates steady, even though the central bank has done so out of concern that the president’s policies could cause inflation.
The Fed gathering arrives at an awkward, potentially perilous moment for the central bank, when Trump is broadly seeking to reconfigure its ranks with loyalists, posing new threats to its political independence.
Around the time that the appeals court ruled, the Senate confirmed Stephen Miran, one of the president’s top advisers, to become a new Fed governor. Miran has said he plans to take a leave of absence from his perch as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to serve at the central bank, before ultimately returning to the president’s service.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
