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.
Trump officials at each other’s throats over ‘sickening’ report on boat strikes: ‘A joke’
Trump administration officials are slamming their colleagues in the Pentagon after a new report downplayed casualty counts from recent military strikes, per a new report.
The Department of Defense turned over an annual report to Congress with a tally of civilian casualties from military strikes in 2025, and one anonymous Trump administration official called it "a f------ joke," according to reporting by The Intercept.
The report addresses allegations of civilian harm during 2025 military attacks in Somalia and Yemen, as well as boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, where the Pentagon insists it's fighting drug trafficking, The Intercept reported.
However, the report asserts that U.S. attacks killed no civilians during military boat strikes, despite reports that those strikes killed more than 120 civilians, according to The Intercept. A second Trump administration official called the report "a total whitewash" and "sickening," adding that the Pentagon has "absolutely no credibility."
The Intercept noted that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation and response programs in the Pentagon. Although the report, which has only been released to Congress but not to the public, denied civilian deaths from the boat strikes, it found that U.S. attacks in the Middle East likely killed or wounded hundreds of civilians, The Intercept reported.
However, the second official said that the report offered "lowball numbers" for civilian casualties from U.S. attacks in Yemen. The report estimated U.S. air and naval strikes in Yemen killed 153 civilians and wounded almost 250, but the Yemen Data Project estimated that 238 civilians were killed and 467 were injured by U.S. attacks.
Both anonymous officials also pointed out that the Pentagon is still reviewing 15 cases of attacks on civilians in Yemen and that the 10-person civilian harm mitigation team at CENTCOM has been reduced to one person. The first official said it "doesn't bode well for the war in Iran," adding, "How will they get through hundreds of cases for Iran if their one civilian harm person still hasn't finished in Yemen?"
