Trump’s Vile, Corrupt Attack on Adam Schiff Is Already Backfiring

“From beginning to end, this process is highly irregular,” Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who’s still well regarded by government insiders, told me.

Making this stranger, these issues involving Schiff have been aired before, during his 2024 Senate campaign, when multiple of Schiff’s Fannie Mae loans and residences came to light. As CNN reported at the time, his spokesperson argued that it was appropriate to describe both residences as primary because they both function that way for the Schiffs (and also to distinguish them from a vacation home).

The Fannie Mae memo itself is squirrelly with its charges. It claims that Schiff “possibly” misrepresented his homes on multiple loans. Read through Trump’s whole tweet on this and it’s clear that someone or other created a tidy package of these charges and handed them to Trump—or whoever wrote this tweet—to translate into this missive. How did that happen?

Experts also point out that the memo shows that the response to the inspector general’s request was forwarded to the head of FHFA—William Pulte, a Trump political appointee and loyalist.

“It is extremely unusual for the response to any IG document request to go to the head of the agency rather than back to the OIG—I have never heard of that,” Bromwich told me. “So far as I know, it is unprecedented for such raw information to be forwarded to the White House. Responses to OIG requests simply don’t go to the White House—ever.”

Did anyone at the White House urge this inspector general to make this document request involving Schiff? Did anyone at the White House quietly hint to Fannie Mae that it should criminally refer this matter to DOJ? Is anyone making an offhand suggestion to DOJ that it open a criminal investigation on this basis?