Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook says she will be unable to attend a Nov. 5 hearing at the White House that’s part of a new investigation into mortgage fraud allegations by President Donald Trump.
Cook will be “executing her official duties as governor at financial and monetary policy meetings in Europe” then, her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a letter to the White House on Tuesday.
Lowell wrote that a hearing would have to take place after the Fed’s Dec. 8-9 meeting so that Cook had enough time to prepare and to accommodate other scheduling conflicts.
In a memo last week, Trump announced that a committee would investigate his claims that Cook committed mortgage fraud. He said she’d have to appear at the White House for a hearing to defend herself. The investigation is the latest escalation in Trump’s ongoing effort to oust Cook from her role at the Fed.
Trump first attempted to fire Cook last year, the first such action by a president in the Fed’s history. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court held that Trump failed to provide Cook with enough notice and an opportunity to defend herself before attempting to remove her, but didn’t spell out what that procedure should look like.
The justices left it to the White House to create a process that would survive another round of legal wrangling.
Cook has denied the mortgage fraud allegations, casting them as a pretext to remove her from office and allow the president to reshape the Fed more to his liking.
Lowell, in his letter, expressed skepticism about “the objectivity and fitness of the committee for its assigned purpose.”
“For example, one of the committee’s three members,” Trump’s chief economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, “already has publicly insinuated that the president has “cause” to fire Governor Cook,” he said.
The White House didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
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