The U.S. president, Donald Trump, opened a new investigation into Federal Reserve director Lisa Cook, weeks before the congressional elections, convening an investigative committee and ordering an unprecedented White House hearing on allegations that she had given false testimony in mortgage loan applications.
Trump has been trying to remove Cook for more than a year, as he seeks greater control over a central bank that, in his view, refuses, for political reasons, to cut interest rates. Cook’s lawyers said on Friday that any fair hearing would demonstrate that there is no legal basis to dismiss her.
“As president, it is my duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, including firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” Trump said in a statement released on the White House website on Friday.
“To assist me in fulfilling this responsibility, the committee will investigate the allegations against Director Cook and inform me whether there is ‘cause’ for the removal of Director Cook,” the statement dated October 7 read.
The committee will hold a four-hour in-person, closed hearing at the White House on November 5 “to review the evidence and the allegations against Director Cook,” the presidential memo said.
The hearing will take place two days after the elections that will determine whether Trump’s Republican Party keeps control of the House and Senate, whose members are responsible for confirming presidential nominees to the Fed. A successful removal of Cook would create a vacancy on the seven-member Fed Board.
If the hearing is “in any way objective, the conclusion will be that Director Cook did not commit mortgage fraud, and there is no grounds to remove her from the Federal Reserve Board,” Cook’s lawyers Abbe Lowell and Norm Eisen said in a statement. “Director Cook welcomes the opportunity to present the facts so that she can clear her name and show that there is no legal basis to dismiss her.”
They said they had been in contact with the White House regarding the process.
Trump first tried to dismiss Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Fed board, in August 2025. No president had ever attempted to oust a sitting Fed director before. It is widely believed that central banks require political independence to ensure their ability to fight inflation as needed.
US Supreme Court Decision
Cook filed suit, arguing that she had done nothing wrong. The case led to a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court this year, ruling that the president could not remove a Fed director at will, and that a clear process must be followed to establish a “cause” for dismissal and allow a defense.
The decision kept Cook in her post but sent the case back to a federal district court, where Judge Kia Cobb set last month the deadline of November 6 for Trump and Cook’s lawyers to submit a joint plan for the case’s progression.
Cook was named to the Fed Board in 2022 by then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and was reappointed in 2023 to a term running through 2038. She has consistently voted with the majority on the Fed’s monetary policy committee, which last month raised rates under the leadership of Kevin Warsh, appointed by Trump to succeed Jerome Powell in May.
“Trump seems to believe that the reason the Fed adopted a tighter stance is that the chair he chose, Warsh, is surrounded by a hawkish Fed Board and politically hostile,” wrote Evercore ISI analyst Krishna Guha. The formation of the investigative committee by Trump “constitutes a reinforcement of his threat to the Fed’s independence and will be counterproductive to the president’s desire for lower interest rates.”
The president’s chief economic policy adviser, Kevin Hassett, along with Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the interim director of the Office of Government Ethics, Keith Sonderling, will comprise the newly formed committee, according to the memo. These members, their representatives, or Justice Department staff will question Cook for “no more than four hours.”
The committee will present its recommendation to Trump on whether there are grounds to remove Cook “as soon as possible,” after the November 10 deadline for Cook to provide any post-hearing statement, according to the memo.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee that oversees the Fed, called the hearing an “irregular tribunal” and part of Trump’s “dangerous attempt to illegally seize control of our country’s central bank.”
Trump asserted that Powell, who remained at the Fed as a director, may have been involved in financial irregularities related to renovations of the Fed building — a claim that triggered a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, now closed, and was rejected last month by an independent watchdog agency.
