C (9:50)
So maybe start with a disclaimer. We're going to talk about mortgage fraud, not politics. So if you are someone who is like, as a listener, super partisan, you have a form of Trump derangement syndrome. Either. Like, everything Trump does is horrible. Everything Trump does is great. This is probably not the podcast for you because we're. I don't care about, like, I find all those things boring. I find the mortgage fraud part fascinating. And let's focus on that. I shared one, two, three, four articles with you. Three or four and you. The mortgage. The first one that you, you alluded to was from the Wall Street Journal, but there's a New York Times article that I cut out and like put in my Save this article and come back to it sometime at the. In July. And that article is called Ken Paxton Claimed Three Houses as his Primary Residence Record show. And this was a in depth reporting analysis that the New York Times did like an investigative report on the Republican Attorney General of Texas. And the New York Times found that this guy, Ken Paxton was claiming three houses as his primary residence, which is mortgage fraud. Let me explain that mortgage fraud is essentially lying on your mortgage application. The federal government in the 1930s created essentially the national mortgage system that we know today. But before that, if you were going to get a mortgage, it was going to be at a local bank, it was going to be short term loan, it was going to have a big balloon payment at the end. Local banks operate like very differently, with very different, not only incentives, but like risk profiles than the national banks and backed by the federal government in order to make housing, you know, quote unquote, more affordable for people. It hasn't worked out this way, you know, spoiler alert. But in order to make it more affordable, the federal government went in to stabilize housing in the 1930s and said we'll create longer term loans, mortgage insurance, down payment assistance. Ultimately after World War II, the GI Bill, Fannie Freddie, longer term debt, things like 30 year mortgages and the like. The idea was we can get people into, we want to create an ownership society. We want to create a preference like a, basically like a preferred. Think of it as a subsidized track in our economy for people who want to get into housing. But we're only going to do this for people to get into housing. This is not going to be for rich people. It's not going to be for people's second homes, it's not going to be for people's third homes. You can't get a federally subsidized, you know, mortgage for your first house and then have a place in Lake Tahoe that we're also going to federally subsidize. There's, for the federal stuff, there's size limits on this. Basically we have said we want people to own homes. And so we're going to create, think of it as like a track for owning homes, a financial track for owning homes that we're going to give preferential treatment to along the way. And then we're going to have another tract for people who own investment properties and second homes and all that stuff. Right? So we've set up this preferred system for you and me and normal regular people to get into homes. All right? We should get into like the mechanisms that create the fraud. But let me just give you like the big picture. If you claim more than one house as your primary residence, you are committing mortgage fraud by basically accessing this preferred system for a house that is not your domicile, your like primary abode, your place. You're essentially cashing in on a federal subsidy or federal program or a series of, in a sense, preferential treatments that are only supposed to be available to individuals getting into a, their only home or their primary home. And so Basically, you can look and say Ken Paxton at some point claimed in his applications that each of these places was going to be his primary residence. Even though that's impossible. You can't have three primary residents. You have one primary resident. He claimed three different times that the place he was financing with a mortgage was going to be his primary residence. And that allowed him to get preferential financing and all that stuff for each of those places. Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, that's the, you know, that's the, the newest one that is in the news. The administration wants to reshape the Federal Reserve. I don't think I'm going out on a political limb here or saying anything partisan to say that President Trump would like or the administration would like Lisa Cook, who is a Fed governor, to be no longer a Fed governor. They, he actually fired her. There's some legal dispute there over whether he can and whether it's just cause and all that. But the reason that he fired her, that he claims, is because she committed mortgage fraud. She did the same thing. She has two homes, both listed as a primary residence. Do you remember Adam Schiff? He was one of the primary people involved in the impeachment of the president in his last term. They went after Adam Schiff for the same thing. He, I think we should say allegedly with all this, but I'm not trying to make the case that they've committed mortgage fraud. I'm saying it's been reported that they have multiple, you know, Adam Schiff, Ken Paxton, what's her. Lisa Cook all have multiple homes in, listed as their primary residence. And that is the definition of mortgage fraud. Does that, does that make sense as a, like an overall concept?
