{"id":281895,"date":"2026-06-30T01:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T01:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/281895\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T01:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T01:44:09","slug":"trump-renews-threat-to-fire-fed-governor-lisa-cook-after-supreme-court-ruling-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/281895\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Renews Threat to Fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook After Supreme Court Ruling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shortly after the Supreme Court blocked President Trump<\/a> from immediately ousting a sitting governor from the Federal Reserve, the president struck a defiant note, signaling he would not surrender his long-running fight to gain more sway over one of the most important stewards of the U.S. economy.<\/p>\n

In the eyes of Mr. Trump, the 5-to-4 decision reached by the justices on Monday amounted only to a legal setback, not an insurmountable defeat. Even as the court acknowledged the century-old tradition of political independence at the nation\u2019s central bank, it did not totally foreclose on the president\u2019s ability to try to dismiss its officials in the future.<\/p>\n

On one hand, the court concluded that Mr. Trump had erred when he first tried to oust Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor, over unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud last year. Siding with a lower court, which had allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her role while the case played out, a majority of the justices said the Trump administration should have afforded Ms. Cook the formal ability to contest the accusations against her.<\/p>\n

But the Supreme Court left much unresolved. The justices did not clearly articulate the full legal criteria that would allow Mr. Trump to fire Ms. Cook, who denies any wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime. Nor did they wager an opinion on the exact allegations against her. And the court majority did not even prescribe the exact venue in which Ms. Cook should be allowed to respond to the allegations.<\/p>\n

The president did not hesitate to seize on that legal ambiguity. In a social media post, he described the decision as merely a \u201cprocedural\u201d matter and vowed to \u201ctake appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!\u201d<\/p>\n

The outcome left many legal scholars on edge, particularly given Mr. Trump\u2019s well-documented desire to install more of his supporters at the top ranks of the central bank as part of his pursuit for lower borrowing costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt may look to be an attempt to quiet the temptation by presidents to meddle with the Fed, but I read it in the opposite direction,\u201d said Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cIt\u2019s an invitation for more meddling.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThis saga is not over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Cook still found reason to celebrate on Monday, as she conveyed in a statement after the court\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s ruling affirms a principle that has underpinned sound economic stewardship for generations: that the Federal Reserve must make all its policy decisions guided by evidence and independent judgment, free from political interference,\u201d Ms. Cook wrote. \u201cI am grateful for this decision, not for my own sake, but for the sake of the American people, whose economic well-being depends on a central bank that answers to its mission, not political intimidation,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Those stakes loomed large over the Supreme Court as it wrestled with Mr. Trump\u2019s power over the Fed, and they appeared to factor heavily into the opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.<\/p>\n

The liberal and conservative justices at one point cited the \u201cruinous financial panics\u201d that had dotted the nation\u2019s history, as they acknowledged the importance of a central bank that can operate free from political influence. And they channeled the country\u2019s founders as they spoke to \u201cthe calamities that could arise from even the \u2018suspicion\u2019 of political manipulation of monetary policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to allowing Ms. Cook to keep her job for the time being, the split decision shot down the Trump administration\u2019s argument that judges had no power to review its decision to fire a Fed official. It also undercut the premise that the president had nearly limitless ability to determine the conditions that would warrant such a removal.<\/p>\n

Chief Justice Roberts said a decision accepting the view of Mr. Trump and his aides \u201cwould allow the president to remove a member of the Federal Reserve at any time, for any reason, without any notice before, and without any judicial check after.\u201d That, the opinion said, \u201cwould turn for-cause protection into little more than at-will employment.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Scott Alvarez, the former general counsel for the Fed, the decision on Monday \u201chelped to reinforce the court as a guardrail for Fed independence.\u201d But it did not make the central bank impenetrable to further political encroachment.<\/p>\n

For one, the Cook ruling was paired with a separate decision that vastly expanded the power of the executive branch by affirming Mr. Trump\u2019s ability to fire all other independent regulators. In her dissent in Ms. Cook\u2019s case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the decision to safeguard the Fed\u2019s independence was \u201cin serious tension\u201d with the court\u2019s ruling on the other agencies.<\/p>\n

By invalidating the independence of those agencies, said Kathryn Judge, a Columbia Law School professor who was a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the central bank\u2019s claim to that autonomy was more \u201cprecarious\u201d given that for the last 90 years, \u201cthe Fed\u2019s independence has really grown alongside the independence of other agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a path forward for the Fed to maintain meaningful independence, but it\u2019s going to require more work to justify that independence in a way that really distinguishes it,\u201d Ms. Judge added.<\/p>\n

The saga around Ms. Cook began last year, after Bill Pulte, then the federal housing director, accused the Fed governor of misrepresenting her finances in order to obtain more favorable mortgage terms. His allegations soon prompted Mr. Trump to demand that Ms. Cook resign<\/a>, before the president later moved to fire her<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Pulte, whom Mr. Trump has since tapped to serve as the director of national intelligence<\/a>, previously said he referred the matter to the Justice Department<\/a>. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, he asserted on social media<\/a> that he believed Ms. Cook \u201cwill be indicted for mortgage fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The justices\u2019 ruling in the case was narrow in a number of ways. The Supreme Court did not explain the conditions that would allow Mr. Trump to fire a Fed official for \u201ccause,\u201d the undefined criteria specified in the central bank\u2019s chartering statute. It opposed Mr. Trump\u2019s argument that presidents have uncontested authority to decide what qualifies as \u201ccause,\u201d but it also did not endorse Ms. Cook\u2019s view that there was a high bar to meet.<\/p>\n

Nor did the justices opine on the charges levied against Ms. Cook, citing the fact that she had not been afforded an opportunity to respond to the allegations, as required by law. That failure to give Ms. Cook the chance for rebuttal contributed heavily to the justices\u2019 decision to allow her to continue serving at the Fed.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be clear, the ultimate question of whether the president can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,\u201d the majority wrote. \u201cIn this opinion, we have not addressed the facts, as they have yet to be found or analyzed under the relevant legal standards. Rather, we have simply addressed the parties\u2019 arguments about the appropriate legal standards under which the facts must be evaluated.\u201d<\/p>\n

By leaving so many questions unanswered, the court gave Mr. Trump an opening to keep fighting, even if it is clear a majority does not want him to keep interfering with the Fed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis punt to the future is mostly a hope that the Trump administration and successive administrations will abandon this effort to meddle with the Federal Reserve,\u201d Mr. Conti-Brown said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shortly after the Supreme Court blocked President Trump from immediately ousting a sitting governor from the Federal Reserve,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[11290,53594,17077,17075,1452,58382,92642,90507,9,24,63,92641,134,136,135,17080,1069,1876],"class_list":["post-281895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-banking-and-financial-institutions","tag-cook","tag-courts-and-the-judiciary","tag-decisions-and-verdicts","tag-donald-j","tag-federal-reserve-system","tag-john-g-jr","tag-lisa-d","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-roberts","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news","tag-supreme-court-us","tag-trump","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}