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Bill Pulte and Ed Martin's shitposting legal strategy
It's backfired so spectacularly that now *they're* the ones being investigated.
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The end of the Jim Comey and Letitia James cases was a humiliation for the Justice Department. It was also an object lesson in the danger of relying on incompetent nitwits.
After weeks of watching Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan flail around like a toddler trying to teach calculus, the cases canceled out to a big fat zero. In some sense, this was a blessing, since it spared Halligan the ignominy of watching some of the best attorneys in the country dissect her hilariously botched prosecutions.
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And it should serve as a warning about the perils of crowdsourcing legal research to literal randos on the internet. But it won’t.
Garbage in
Two of those self-appointed crowdsourcers are Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Justice Department hack of all trades Ed Martin.
Pulte is the nepobaby of a homebuilding empire whose own family has been loudly distancing itself from him for years. His latest fumbles involve sharing confidential mortgage pricing data between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two agencies he purports to lead simultaneously — and talking the president into supporting 50-year mortgages, an idea so unpopular that the administration immediately memory-holed it.
At 37, Pulte has no experience in the mortgage industry, and it shows! But that’s not really relevant, since Pulte’s main job appears to be pawing through confidential financial documents to invent crimes to pin on Democrats. With his access to mortgage records of virtually every American, his spelunking has led him to make “criminal referrals” of longtime Trump foes Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook, and Rep. Eric Swalwell.
Real criminal referrals are made to the Justice Department confidentially, but Pulte prefers to post his on X.
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Despite his performative menace, though, none of Pulte’s allegations have led to criminal prosecutions. After James’s lawyer Abbe Lowell publicly dogwalked Pulte’s flimsy claims about his client, Halligan charged James in connection with an entirely different property in Virginia.
The efforts to indict Schiff have come up empty, as well, with federal prosecutors in Maryland pointedly refusing to charge the California senator with the mortgage fraud Pulte trumpeted. US Attorney Kelly Hayes reportedly expects to be fired for failing to deliver the required political scalp, as was Halligan’s predecessor Erik Seibert in Virginia.
Pulte’s trusty sidekick for this retribution roadtrip is Ed Martin, a l