U.S. President Donald Trump asks U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent if he wants to be Fed Chair, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 5, 2025. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Bloomberg has discovered that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent once agreed to listed two houses as his "principal residence" in the exact same manner that President Donald Trump has accused Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook of doing in his quest to oust her.
"Bessent’s conflicting agreements obligated him to occupy homes in New York and Massachusetts as his main residence at the same time in 2007. But there’s no sign of any wrongdoing on his part, mortgage experts say. Rather, his case demonstrates that an incongruity in home-loan filings isn’t necessarily proof of fraud," Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold explained on X.
Bessent's Bank of America mortgage documents show that they weren't "relying on the pledges and never expected him to occupy both homes as primary residences," Bloomberg says.
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But the parallels to Cook are glaring.
Her own signed mortgage docs in 2021 were, Bloomberg says, "for a home in Michigan and a condo in Atlanta, saying they would both be her primary residence for the next year. Both agreements, with different credit unions, were conditions for getting loans on the properties, of $203,000 and $540,000, respectively. Turns out, the Georgia property was referred to as a 'vacation home.'"
"[Trump] can’t fire her without cause and the court needs to determine whether there’s cause. I don’t know if there’s a vacancy," Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said about Trump's push to fire Cook, who continues to work as the White House appeals the ruling allowing her to do so.
Trump said her contradictory mortgage pledges were reason enough to remove her from the Fed board, calling them “potentially criminal conduct."
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"Cook’s contradictory mortgage agreements are similar in at least some ways to the ones Bessent, a Trump appointee, made years ago," Bloomberg notes, saying Bessent said a seven-bedroom Georgian manor he was buying in 2007 in Bedford Hills, New York, would be his “principal residence” over the next year, and on, the same day, he said the same about a beachfront house in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Bessent's attorneys gave Bloomberg a similar explanation to Cook's, saying, there was an “understanding and agreement that the Bedford and Provincetown properties were secondary residences.”
Bessent and labor secretary Lori-Chavez-DeRemer, are at least two of Trump's Cabinet members who have made similar mortgage agreements as Cook's.
When asked to comment about Cook on the Fox Business Network in August, Bessent said, "There are people like President Trump and myself who think that if a Fed official committed mortgage fraud, that this should be examined, and that they shouldn’t be serving as one of the nation’s leading financial regulators.”