US President Donald Trump opened another chapter in his effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook Friday by establishing a “committee of inquiry” to investigate allegations that she made false statements in mortgage applications.
The inquiry will include a hearing at the White House November 5, Trump said in a written memo, that Cook ‘shall’ attend to answer questions from the committee. The hearing wouldn’t be public but a transcript would be published, the memo said.
Trump’s extraordinary demand that Cook testify before the committee will likely renew concerns about threats to the Federal Reserve’s independence. The president has repeatedly called for the central bank to cut its key interest rate, but just last month, the Fed raised it instead, led by Chairman Kevin Warsh, whom Trump appointed earlier this year.
Trump’s attempts to fire Cook from the Fed’s seven-member board of governors represent the first time in the central bank’s 113-year history that a president has sought to remove a Fed governor. Cook was appointed by former President Joe Biden and is the first Black woman on the Fed’s board. Trump’s attacks on her followed other efforts to oust or indict Black officials, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and General Charles Q. Brown, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump wrote in the memorandum.
Cook’s attorneys, Abbe Lowell and Norman Eisen, said they were considering having Cook appear at the November 5 hearing and respond to the charges.
“We have engaged with the White House to evaluate whether the process proposed has a possibility of being a genuine one and not simply a box checking exercise,” Lowell and Eisen said in a statement. “Governor Cook welcomes the opportunity to present the facts so she can clear her name and demonstrate there is no legal basis to fire her.”
The “committee of inquiry” will be composed of Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser, who has frequently echoed Trump’s criticisms of the Fed; Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, whom the president has also appointed to lead the Labor Department, and Andrea Lucas, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whom Trump appointed in November 2025.
Fraud accusation
Trump initially tried to fire Cook in August 2025 after alleging she had committed mortgage fraud by declaring two different properties to be her “primary” residence in mortgage applications in 2021. Mortgages on primary homes can often receive a lower interest rate or other beneficial terms.
Cook has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. Lowell and Eisen have previously said Cook committed an “inadvertent error” and did refer to one of the properties as a vacation home in other documents.
“An inadvertent error is not fraud, as the President and a third of his cabinet should know because they reportedly did the same thing,” Lowell and Eisen said in August.
The Federal Reserve declined to comment on Trump’s announcement.
Trump and some of his economic advisers have blamed the Fed’s broader rate-setting committee, which includes 12 voting members and 19 officials in total, for forcing last month’s rate hike, even though it followed comments by Warsh in August that signaled higher rates were likely. As a member of the board of governors, Cook is also one of the 12 voting members of the committee. The vote to lift rates September 16 was unanimous.
The move also follows a Supreme Court ruling in June that Cook could keep her job after Trump sought to fire her last year. That ruling included a footnote that said nothing prevented Trump from “trying again” as long as she was given proper notice and an opportunity to respond to the charges.
Trump said the committee of inquiry will seek to establish whether there is “cause” to fire Cook, as required under the law governing the Fed. The Supreme Court said in June that a for-cause firing required an alleged offense that was serious and related to an official’s job.
Scott Alvarez, formerly the chief counsel for the Fed, said that President William Howard Taft set up a similar commission in 1912 to remove two officials from an independent agency. The commission created by Trump goes beyond the type of process the Supreme Court said was needed to fire Cook.
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“It’s an attempt to show that he’s really giving Cook as much process as possible,” Alvarez said.
Still, the allegations against Cook don’t appear to meet the “for cause” standard set out by the Supreme Court, Alvarez said.
Other analysts said that Trump will likely use the process to ultimately fire Cook.
“We do not see why the White House would start this process if it were not trying to create a way to justify removing Cook from her job,” Jaret Seiberg, managing director of TD Cowen’s Washington Research Group, said in a note to clients.
