Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor enmeshed in a bitter court fight to keep her job, disclosed on the “property use” field of a preliminary loan estimate in May 2021 that an Atlanta residence is a “vacation home,” according to a review of the document first published Friday by Reuters.

Further, a second document from December 2021 – an SF-86 form used to obtain security clearance in the vetting process for her Fed nomination – describes the Atlanta condo as a “2nd home.”

The disclosures counter paperwork referenced in a criminal referral sent to the Justice Department last month by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. Pulte expressed concern that Cook may have committed mortgage fraud because a clause on a July 2021 document stipulated that the Georgia home would be her principal residence. Cook, two weeks earlier, allegedly had taken out a mortgage on a Michigan home, indicating that home would be a principal residence, according to the referral.

The DOJ, which represents President Donald Trump in his effort to fire Cook, did not mention the disclosures in a reply to an appeals court Sunday. The DOJ had requested the court stay a district judge’s ruling – allowing Cook to stay on at the Fed – by Monday. That would effectively bar Cook from voting along with the Federal Open Market Committee on Tuesday and Wednesday to set the interest rate.

Rather, the DOJ wrote, Cook “has provided no explanation for the contradictory representations apparent on the face of her mortgage agreements, and that alone is grounds to stay” the district judge’s preliminary injunction.

Cook’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, in a filing Saturday, said a stay by the appeals court, would “be the first signal from the courts that our system of government is no longer able to guarantee the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

“Nothing would then stop the president from firing other members of the Board on similarly flimsy pretexts,” Lowell wrote. “The risks to the nation’s economy could be dire.”

The president can fire a Fed governor for cause. However, Lowell has consistently argued that the mortgage fraud allegations do not constitute cause and are, in effect, a prop to oust central bank officials who historically haven’t agreed with Trump’s outspoken demands to lower the interest rate.

Pulte, in a post Sunday on X, said Cook “has had 3.5 weeks to provide exonerating evidence, but instead, she leaks to the news media ‘estimates’ and then claims to the court that those news reports, which are her ‘creation,’ exonerate her.”

“She is so deceitful,” Pulte wrote. “Someone like this does not belong at the Fed.”

Kathleen Engel, a law professor at Suffolk University, said the loan estimate form “actually rebuts any inference that she engaged in fraud.”

“The fraud allegation is dramatically weakened by the evidence that this was on her application,” Engel told The New York Times.

The loan estimate, in a letter from a credit union, does not rise to the status of a legal document proving that Cook was transparent about her plans for the property. However, it infers she may have told the lender how she meant to use the home.

Pulte, in another X post Saturday, said Cook “represents herself as an extremely accomplished financial operator.”

“If Dr. Cook solicited estimates as a vacation home and then entered into a mortgage agreement as a primary residence, that is extremely concerning, and in my opinion, evidences further intent to defraud,” he wrote.

Cook, however, never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to a Fulton County tax official and a review of property records by Reuters. That may help her case.

In its reply Sunday, the DOJ referenced the district court’s temporary restraining order, calling the judge’s interpretation “backwards, reading in limitations that Congress knew how to impose but did not.”

Lowell, meanwhile, doubled down on the importance that the Fed remain above the sway of the president.

“Central banks like the Federal Reserve are independent for a reason: Even the perception of political influence can destroy the investor confidence that is essential for economic growth and stability,” Lowell wrote Saturday. “That bell cannot be unrung.”

Cook’s status is not the only question mark for this week’s FOMC meeting. The Senate is set Monday to vote on whether to confirm Stephen Miran, a Trump nominee, to another Fed board seat. 

Miran, whose Fed term would expire in January, is serving as chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and has said he would take an unpaid leave of absence from his White House job while serving at the central bank. That has raised criticism from Democrats – largely, on the question of how independent Miran could be if he plans to return to a job under Trump.

If confirmed, the Trump administration presumably would want to install him ahead of Tuesday’s FOMC meeting to lock in a vote to lower the interest rate.