Aug 7 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump is renewing his effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook after the U.S. Supreme Court in June refused to let the president fire her, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The White House told Cook in a letter this week that the president was “considering” removing her from her role and demanded she respond to unproven mortgage fraud allegations within three weeks — allegations her attorney called “baseless.”
The salvo against Cook is the second time this week Trump has restarted an effort to take actions that the Supreme Court blocked earlier this year. Trump earlier this week also issued another order attempting to limit birthright citizenship after the high court ruled against his previous effort to limit who is automatically considered a U.S. citizen.
The letter to Cook, signed by Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino and first reported by ABC News, alleged that she committed crimes that could be punishable by up to 30 years in prison and that her conduct constituted negligence that called into question her trustworthiness as a Fed governor, ABC reported.
In a statement, Cook’s lawyer said “there is no valid cause” for removing Cook from her position.
“As we did before, we will challenge this latest pretext and preserve her position and the historic role of the Fed,” attorney Abbe D. Lowell said.
The Federal Reserve did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump last year cited mortgage fraud in trying to fire Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor. Cook denied the allegations, calling them a pretext to remove her for monetary policy differences.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused in June to allow the firing, standing firm to preserve the central bank’s cherished independence against the Republican president’s unprecedented challenge.
The court, in a 5-4 ruling, blocked Trump from removing Cook for now, providing a safeguard for the Fed specifically.
No other president since the central bank’s founding in 1913 had sought to oust a Fed governor.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the high court ruling, said Trump had “failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her.”
Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices in the ruling. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
While the ruling definitively protects Fed officials from being fired at will by a president, the court said its ruling was not deciding the validity of the factual dispute in the case. It has since returned the case to lower courts.
“It at least remains an open question what precisely happened here, and indeed whether Cook committed ‘gross negligence,’ let alone ‘deceitful and potentially criminal conduct,’ as the president’s letter alleges,” Roberts wrote, adding that Cook must be able to respond to the charges made against her.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya; editing by Michelle Nichols and David Gaffen)
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