Lawyers for Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook and the Justice Department laid out their respective cases for two hours Friday, but a federal judge ended the hearing with no ruling and no timeline to expect a decision.

The hearing came a day after Cook sued President Donald Trump over his attempt to dismiss her last week from the central bank’s board. Trump asserted he fired Cook for cause after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte submitted a criminal referral to the DOJ, alleging mortgage fraud on two properties in Georgia and Michigan.

Many of U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb’s questions Friday centered around what constitutes “cause.” Courts have typically interpreted “cause” to mean “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Trump’s lawyers, in a court filing Friday, ahead of the hearing, called cause a “capacious” standard.

“Even if it were subject to any judicial review — and over a century of caselaw suggests it is not — that review would have to be highly deferential” to the president’s constitutional authority, the argument reads.

“Making facially contradictory statements in financial documents — whether a criminal burden of proof could be sustained or not — is more than sufficient ground for removing a senior financial regulator from office,” Trump’s lawyers asserted.

Cook’s attorneys have argued that “unsubstantiated and unproven” allegations that Cook “‘potentially’ erred” while filling out a mortgage form before serving on the Fed board does not make “cause.”

“Cause for the president means [Cook] won't go along with the interest rate drop," Abbe Lowell, a lawyer representing the Fed governor, said in court Friday, according to Reuters.

Trump has argued for months that the interest rate should be up to 3 percentage points lower than it is now, yet the Federal Open Market Committee – on which all Fed board members vote – has kept interest rates steady since the president has taken office. 

Two Fed governors – both Trump appointees – dissented with the interest-rate decision in July, and another governor resigned, leading Trump to nominate presumed loyalist Stephen Miran. Ousting Cook would give Trump nominees a majority on the seven-seat Fed board.

Lowell asserts that is Trump’s true motive in seeking to fire Cook.

“A bad motive can illuminate that there was no real cause to begin with,” Lowell argued, according to The Wall Street Journal, calling fraud allegations the Trump administration’s “weapon of choice.” 

Cobb on Friday devoted some thought, too, to Cook’s argument that she received neither notice nor due process in Trump’s firing.

In their filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers argued that Cook “offered no defense to the charges — not in public or in private” after the president publicized Pulte’s criminal referral Aug. 20.

“Accordingly, five days later, the President terminated Dr. Cook … after it was clear that no adequate response was forthcoming,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

“How did she know she had five days to respond?” Cobb asked the DOJ lawyers Friday, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If there was an explanation, “we would have heard it by now,” DOJ lawyer Yaakov Roth asserted, according to Bloomberg.

“There was, at least as far as the record appears, no response, no intent, no letter saying ‘Hey I disagree with this, give me a chance to tell you why,’ no statement of, ‘this is false,’” Roth said. 

Roth also disputed Cook’s assertion that she did not receive proper notice because the allegations were made in a social media post.

“You’re not suggesting what happened would satisfy due process requirements?” Cobb asked Roth, according to Bloomberg. 

Roth said he would.

Ahead of Friday’s hearing, Pulte filed a second criminal referral with the DOJ against Cook, alleging the Fed governor took out a mortgage on a Cambridge, Massachusetts, condo for $361,000, and claimed the property was a second home. Pulte alleges Cook disclosed eight months later that she had earned between $15,000 and $50,000 in rental income and declared it an investment property.

“3 strikes and you’re out,” Pulte wrote Thursday night in a post on X, publicizing the referral.

Lowell, in a statement seen by Bloomberg, called Pulte’s latest referral “an obvious smear campaign aimed at discrediting Gov. Cook” and labeled Pulte “a political operative who has taken to social media more than 30 times in the last two days and demanded her removal before any review of the facts or evidence.”

“Nothing in these vague, unsubstantiated allegations has any relevance to Gov. Cook’s role at the Federal Reserve, and they in no way justify her removal from the Board,” Lowell said.

Lowell doubled down on the accusation-by-social media post pattern in court Friday.

“You can’t have Director Pulte’s crazy midnight tweets be the cause,” Lowell told Cobb, according to CNBC.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the central bank board are also named as defendants in Cook’s case. Powell, for his part Friday, asked Cobb to keep the “status quo” — with Cook staying in her job — at least until a final decision is made by the court, CNBC reported.

The Fed board, meanwhile, submitted a filing Friday, expressing its preference for a “prompt ruling.”

Trump’s lawyers, however, asserted that Cook, in her request for a temporary restraining order, “identifies no irreparable harm that requires overnight relief, or even relief within the next 14 days.”

The lawyers cited the next interest rate-setting date – Sept. 16 – noting that it, too, is “beyond the default date for expiration of a TRO.”

“The public has a strong interest in stable governance at the Federal Reserve — a stability that would be undercut by the type of ping-pong injunctions and stays that have characterized other litigation,” the Trump team argued. “For all of these reasons, the Court should deny the requested TRO.”

In the wake of the hearing, hundreds of economists came to Cook’s support, in an open letter published Tuesday. They said the “unproven accusations” against Cook “threaten[] the fundamental principle of central bank independence and undermine[] trust in one of America’s most important institutions.”

At least one analyst, meanwhile, praised the Cook team for not addressing the allegations in their court filings – save for a reference that the mortgage snafu may have been a “clerical error.” 

“You don’t want to play [Trump’s] game, or legitimize his game by playing it,” Robert Hockett, a professor of law and public finance at Cornell Law School, told CNBC. “I’m not surprised at all that the lawsuit wouldn’t include paragraph after paragraph providing the details of her mortgage applications. Because, that would, in effect, be conceding that there’s something legitimate about what Trump is doing.”