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Deadline Legal Blog: Trump's quest to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve is now with the Supreme Court [View all]
It’s the latest legal test of Trump’s power in his second term. The Roberts Court has previously signaled its willingness to protect Fed independence.
It’s already been proven that Trump’s self-proclaimed causes are fabricated.
— @jimrissmiller.bsky.social 2025-09-18T20:35:54.994Z
Trump’s quest to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve is now with the Supreme Court www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/lisa-cook-federal-reserve-supreme-court-trump-rcna232176
A challenge for Trump in fully controlling the board is that the Federal Reserve Act says the president can only remove board members for cause. And while the Supreme Court has been letting Trump fire members of other agencies without cause, the Republican-appointed high court majority went out of its way earlier this year to signal that it won’t let Trump do so with the Fed.
So the president seemingly needed to come up with a reason to fire Cook. That’s apparently what led his administration to develop the claim that she committed mortgage fraud prior to her Senate confirmation (her term expires in 2038). The board’s staggered terms are designed to insulate members from the whims of a given presidential administration. Recent reporting suggests the fraud claim might be false, and Cook hasn’t been criminally charged with any fraud......
The two judges in the appellate panel majority, Michelle Childs and Bradley Garcia, are Biden appointees (as are Cobb and Cook). In siding with Cook, they focused on due process, noting that the administration “does not dispute that it failed to provide Cook even minimal process — that is, notice of the allegation against her and a meaningful opportunity to respond — before she was purportedly removed.” In his dissent, Katsas wrote that Cobb was wrong to rule that Cook 1) had a constitutionally protected property interest in her office; and that 2) she can’t be removed based on conduct prior to her appointment......
When she filed her lawsuit in late August, Cook called Trump’s attempt to fire her “unprecedented and illegal.” Underscoring the stakes in her civil complaint, she noted that Fed independence “is vital to its ability to make sound economic decisions, free from the political pressures of an election cycle.” She warned that if “markets and the public believe that the central bank is making decisions based on political pressure rather than sound economic data, that confidence erodes.”
In her ruling to keep Cook on the board while her suit proceeds, Judge Cobb noted that the case involves “the first purported ‘for cause’ removal of a Board Governor in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history,” and that it “raises important matters of first impression,” meaning issues that haven’t been legally resolved by courts before.
So the president seemingly needed to come up with a reason to fire Cook. That’s apparently what led his administration to develop the claim that she committed mortgage fraud prior to her Senate confirmation (her term expires in 2038). The board’s staggered terms are designed to insulate members from the whims of a given presidential administration. Recent reporting suggests the fraud claim might be false, and Cook hasn’t been criminally charged with any fraud......
The two judges in the appellate panel majority, Michelle Childs and Bradley Garcia, are Biden appointees (as are Cobb and Cook). In siding with Cook, they focused on due process, noting that the administration “does not dispute that it failed to provide Cook even minimal process — that is, notice of the allegation against her and a meaningful opportunity to respond — before she was purportedly removed.” In his dissent, Katsas wrote that Cobb was wrong to rule that Cook 1) had a constitutionally protected property interest in her office; and that 2) she can’t be removed based on conduct prior to her appointment......
When she filed her lawsuit in late August, Cook called Trump’s attempt to fire her “unprecedented and illegal.” Underscoring the stakes in her civil complaint, she noted that Fed independence “is vital to its ability to make sound economic decisions, free from the political pressures of an election cycle.” She warned that if “markets and the public believe that the central bank is making decisions based on political pressure rather than sound economic data, that confidence erodes.”
In her ruling to keep Cook on the board while her suit proceeds, Judge Cobb noted that the case involves “the first purported ‘for cause’ removal of a Board Governor in the Federal Reserve’s 111-year history,” and that it “raises important matters of first impression,” meaning issues that haven’t been legally resolved by courts before.
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