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A confidant of Bill Pulte, the Trump administration’s top housing regulator, provided confidential mortgage pricing data fannie mae For a major competitor, senior executives at the government-backed lending giant worried that it could expose the company to claims it was colluding with a rival to fix mortgage rates.
Emails reviewed by The Associated Press show that Fannie Mae executives were nervous about a “very problematic” disclosure of data by the company’s marketing chief Lauren Smith, who was acting on Pulte’s behalf.
“Lauren, the information provided to Freddie Mac in this email is a problem,” Malloy Evans, senior vice president of Fannie Mae’s single-family mortgage division, wrote in an Oct. 11 email addressed to Smith. “That’s confidential, competitive information.”
He also impersonated Fannie Mae’s CEO, Priscilla Almodovar, on an email with the subject line: “As Director Pulte asked.” Evans asked Fannie Mae’s top lawyer to “consider what steps, if any, we need to take legally to protect ourselves now.”
While Smith still holds his position, senior Fannie Mae executives whose conduct was questioned were ousted from their jobs late last month, as well as internal ethics monitors who had been investigating Pulte and his associates.
Housing industry troubled by dismissals
The dismissal caused a stir in the accommodation industry and was condemned democratIt also provided Pulte’s critics with evidence to support claims that he took advantage of available non-public information to pursue his political objectives,
“This is another example of Bill Pulte weaponizing his role to do Donald Trump’s bidding instead of reducing costs amid the housing crisis,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “His behavior raises important questions and he needs to be brought before Congress to answer them.”
The episode is the latest example of Pulte using a typically low-profile position in the federal bureaucracy to boost his own stature and attract President Trump’s attention. They have prompted mortgage fraud investigations of prominent Democrats, some of the president’s most famous opponents, including Senator Adam Schiff of California, New York Attorney General Letitia. james and California Representative Eric Swalwell.
In June, he ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare a proposal for companies to accept cryptocurrencies, as part of criteria for purchasing mortgages from banks, another industry Trump has promoted. Last week, he persuaded Trump about the attractiveness of 50-year mortgages as a way to increase home buying and construction — a proposal that was widely criticized because it would drastically increase the total price of the loan.
Pulte is also targeting the country’s largest homebuilders
Pulte has also focused on large homebuilding companies, which has drawn Trump’s ire. Pulte requested confidential Fannie Mae data and has publicly indicated that he is considering action if companies do not increase manufacturing volumes.
“I’m looking at Fannie Mae builder data and with the top three homebuilders we buy easily over $20 billion in their loans!” He posted on X in early October.
In a brief statement, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which Pulte leads, did not respond to AP’s questions, but said the agency “requires its regulated entities to conduct their operations in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
Fannie Mae said that “Compliance with the law is taken very seriously and we have a rigorous program to ensure that we comply with all laws and regulations.”
Pulte and Smith did not respond to requests for comment.
to oblige the president
Since his appointment to lead the FHFA, Pulte has tried to ingratiate himself with Trump. Pulte, the 37-year-old scion of a homebuilding company fortune, has gained a reputation as a hyper-online millennial with a thirst for recognition and a desire to please the president. Records show he and his wife also donated nearly $1 million to Trump’s campaign.
When Trump sought to remove Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell, Pulte became a prominent attacker, regularly taking to Twitter, where he has more than 3 million followers, to castigate the central bank leader.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that some Fannie Mae ethics and oversight officials who were fired last month were investigating whether Pulte improperly obtained mortgage information for James, who was charged with bank fraud last month after Pulte sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department. She said the allegations, which she denies, are politically motivated.
Pulte’s power over the mortgage lending industry is unusual. Shortly after Senate confirmation, he appointed himself chairman of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have trillions of dollars in assets. The companies serve as an important backstop for the home loan industry by purchasing mortgages from individual lenders, which are packaged together and sold to investors.
The three competing roles present the potential for a conflict of interest that was detailed in the emails reviewed by the AP. Like many matters of Trump’s public policy WashingtonIt seems it started with a social media post.
In early October, Trump criticized the homebuilding industry, which he compared to the oil-market-dominating cartel OPEC.
“They’re sitting on 2 million vacant lots, a record,” the president posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “I’m asking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to bring on the Big Homebuilders.”
“On it,” Pulte posted in response on X.
Sensitive data collected
He turned to Smith, who had become a trusted Pulte ally in his brief tenure at Fannie Mae, whose work portfolio crossed the boundaries dividing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHFA, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Soon, a team at Fannie Mae was overseeing an effort to pull together a tranche of mortgage data, according to emails reviewed by the AP. According to the emails, Smith played a central role and shared confidential lender-level pricing information with Freddie Mac, causing an uproar at both companies. A spokesman for Freddie Mac declined to comment.
In an October 11 email to Smith, Fannie Mae mortgage executive Evans also added other people to the email chain because they were “involved in efforts this week to compile this information” and he “wanted to make sure you do not escalate this issue.”
Fannie Mae general counsel Danielle McCoy said the information Smith provided to Freddie Mac “should never have been shared” and “could put the company at risk.”
Others who were part of the email chain included Almodovar; Chief Operating Officer Peter Akwaboah; Devang Doshi, Senior Vice President, Capital Markets; and John Roscoe, a Pulte loyalist and former Trump White House aide, who served as Fannie Mae’s vice president for public relations.
A few days later, Almodovar, McCoy and Evans – who did not respond to requests for comment – were out of a job. Meanwhile, Roscoe was promoted to co-chairman of the company, while Akwaboa was named acting CEO.
Pulte also got what he wanted.
A day after the brief email exchange, Trump posted a graphic on his Truth social network that showed Fannie Mae’s logo, a list of large homebuilders, and the headline “We Give Them Billions.”
Pulte immediately reposted it.
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Associated Press writer Fatima Hussain contributed reporting.