Trump's attack dog faces own paperwork scandal after targeting Fed official

President Donald Trump's Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Bill Pulte, has emerged as a surprise attack dog for the president's agenda, fishing up a series of document discrepancies and using them as the basis to file shaky mortgage fraud complaints against various politicians and civil servants who have angered the president, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James, and most recently Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.

But it turns out his own financial record may not be squeaky clean.

According to Mother Jones, Pulte, who inherited a vast real estate fortune, "got his job in the administration about three years after his wife, Diana Pulte, donated $500,000 to a super PAC backing Trump. The donation was channeled through a Delaware shell company, ML Organization LLC, that Bill Pulte controlled. It came at a crucial moment, as the former president was just beginning to get his new campaign off the ground following his reelection defeat and the 2021 Capitol insurrection."

At the time, the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint alleging that this illegally obscured the source of the campaign fundraising.

"A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation concluded only this year, when the FEC quietly announced that the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose that Diana Pulte was the real source of the money," said the report — however, the FEC did not assert that either Bill Pulte or his wife broke the law.

A spokesperson for the housing agency told Mother Jones, “The FEC looked at the issue and determined that there was no violation by Director Pulte.” However, neither Pulte nor anyone at the agency addressed the fact that the paperwork falsely claimed an LLC, rather than his wife, donated the money, which "looks like the same kind of paperwork sloppiness — in information ultimately provided to the federal government — that Bill Pulte is now harassing Trump foes over."

Jeff Hauser of the watchdog group Revolving Door Project said, “I am extremely skeptical that Bill Pulte would come across 1/100th as well as Lisa Cook if his paperwork were scrutinized as closely as he has scrutinized Cook’s paperwork.”

All of this is occurring as litigation still continues over Trump's $550 million civil fraud judgment for his own mortgage valuation scams against the state of New York, which a state appeals court just tossed while upholding the fraud finding — a decision both parties are certain to appeal.