This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud. 

At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”

Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.

“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.) 

But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality. 

Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”

Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.

In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”

The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him.

At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club. 

Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch. 

Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.

But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.

Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his neighbors are.”

In the ensuing years, listings popped up in local newspapers advertising each of the homes for rent. At one point in 1997, the larger of the two homes, a 7-bedroom, 7-bathroom Mediterranean Revival mansion, was listed for $3,000 per day.

Even if Trump did violate the law with his two primary-residence mortgages in Florida, the loans have since been paid off and the mid-1990s is well outside the statute of limitations for mortgage fraud.

A spokesperson for Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, did not answer questions about the Trump mortgages.

“It’s highly unlikely we would have original documents for a 32-year-old transaction, but generally in private client mortgages the terms of the transactions are based on the overall relationship,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and the mortgages are not backed by or sold to any government sponsored entity.”

Trump’s two mortgages in Palm Beach bear similarities to the loans taken out by political rivals whom his administration has accused of fraud. 

In October, federal prosecutors charged New York Attorney General Letitia James over her mortgage. James has been one of Trump’s top targets since she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. 

A central claim in the case the Trump Justice Department brought against her is that she purchased a house in Virginia, pledging to her lender that it would serve as her second home, then proceeded to use it as an investment property and rent it out. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” according to the indictment. 

Trump’s Florida mortgage agreements appear to have made a more significant misrepresentation, as he claimed those homes would be his primary residence, not his secondary home as James did, before proceeding to rent them out. 

James has denied the allegations against her, and the case was dismissed last month over procedural issues, though the Justice Department has been trying to reindict her. 

The circumstances around Trump’s mortgages are also similar to the case his administration has made against Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

Trump declared he was firing Cook earlier this year over her mortgages, as he has sought to bend the traditionally independent agency to his will and force it to lower interest rates. Cook, who denied wrongdoing, has sued to block the termination and continues to serve on the Fed board as that legal fight continues. 

In a letter to Cook, Trump specifically noted that she signed two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other — just as records show he did in Florida. 

“You signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year. Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump wrote. “It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second.” 

He called the loans potentially criminal and wrote, “at a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness.”

The Trump administration has made similar fraud allegations against other political enemies, including Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.

In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)

Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”

Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” 

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee. 

“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.

Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”

“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.

In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.” 

Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.

This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.

The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)

The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”

“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”

Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore

The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.

The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million. 

But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.

Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.

How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases. 

The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year. 

In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.

Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.

Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.

Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.

Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.

Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.

The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)

Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.

Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups. 

As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)

The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors.

The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed. While there is no prohibition on Chinese ownership in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated and the issue is treated by the U.S. government as a significant national security concern.

“They obviously have Chinese investors to be honest,” Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major SpaceX investor, said in a deposition last year, adding that some are “directly on the cap table.” “Cap table” refers to the company’s capitalization table, which lists its shareholders.

Kahlon’s testimony does not reveal the scope of Chinese investment in SpaceX or the identities of the investors. Kahlon has long been close with the company’s leadership and runs his own firm that acts as a middleman for wealthy investors looking to buy shares of SpaceX.

SpaceX keeps its full ownership structure secret. It was previously reported that some Chinese investors had bought indirect stakes in SpaceX, investing in middleman funds that in turn owned shares in the rocket company. The new testimony describes direct investments that suggest a closer relationship with SpaceX.

SpaceX has thrived as it snaps up sensitive U.S. government contracts, from building spy satellites for the Pentagon to launching spacecraft for NASA. U.S. embassies and the White House have connected to the company’s Starlink internet service too. Musk’s roughly 42% stake in the company is worth an estimated $168 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d be one of the 10 richest people in the world.

National security law experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding the direct Chinese investment in SpaceX. Whether there was cause for concern would depend on the details, they said, but the U.S. government has asserted that China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

If the investors got access to nonpublic information about the company — say, details on its contracts or supply chain — it could be useful to Chinese intelligence, said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments. That “would create huge risks that, if realized, would have huge consequences for national security,” she said.

SpaceX did not respond to questions for this story. Kahlon declined to comment.

The new court records come from litigation in Delaware between Kahlon and another investor. The testimony was sealed until ProPublica, with the assistance of lawyers at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller, moved in the spring to make it public. SpaceX fought the effort, but a judge ruled that some of the records must be released. Kahlon’s testimony was publicly filed this week.

Buying shares in SpaceX is much more difficult than buying a piece of a publicly traded company like Tesla or Microsoft. SpaceX has control over who can buy stakes in it, and the company’s investors fall into different categories. The most rarefied group is the direct investors, who actually own SpaceX shares. This group includes funds led by Kahlon, Peter Thiel and a handful of other venture capitalists with personal ties to Musk. Then there are the indirect investors, who effectively buy stakes in SpaceX through a middleman like Kahlon. (The indirect investors are actually buying into a fund run by the middleman, typically paying a hefty fee.) All previously known Chinese investors in SpaceX fell into the latter category.

This year, ProPublica reported on an unusual feature of SpaceX’s approach to investment from China. According to testimony from the Delaware case, the company allows Chinese investors to buy stakes in SpaceX so long as the money is routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs. Companies only have to proactively report Chinese investments to the government in limited circumstances, and there aren’t hard and fast rules for how much is too much.

After ProPublica’s report, House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raising alarms about the company’s “potential obfuscation.” “In light of the extreme sensitivity of SpaceX’s work for DoD and NASA, this lack of transparency raises serious questions,” they wrote. It’s unclear if any action was taken in response.

Kahlon has turned his access to SpaceX stock into a lucrative business. His investor list reads like an atlas of the world. The investors’ names are redacted in the recently unsealed document, but their addresses span from Chile to Malaysia. One is in Russia. At least two are in mainland China. One is in Qatar. (In one email to SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Kahlon said a Los Angeles-based fund had money from the Qatari royal family and was already invested in SpaceX.)

“You made a big fortune,” a China-based financier wrote to Kahlon four years ago. “Lol something like that. SpaceX has been the gift that keeps on giving,” Kahlon responded. “All thanks to you.”

Kahlon first met with SpaceX when it was a fledgling startup, according to court records. SpaceX’s CFO, Bret Johnsen, who’s been there for 14 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.” Johnsen also testified that SpaceX has no formal policy about accepting investments from countries deemed adversaries by the U.S. government. But he said he asks fund managers to “stay away from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean ownership interest” because that could make it “more challenging to win government contracts.”

There are indications that by 2021, Kahlon was wary of raising funds from China. The U.S. government had grown increasingly concerned about Chinese investments in tech companies, and that June, Kahlon told an associate he was “being picky” with who he’d let buy into a new SpaceX opportunity. “Only people I want to have a relationship with long term. No one from mainland China,” Kahlon said.

But as he raced to assemble a pool of investors, those concerns appeared to fade away. By November 2021, Kahlon was personally raising money from China to buy SpaceX stakes. He told a Shanghai-based company that if it invested with him, it would get quarterly updates on SpaceX’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” court records show.

The Shanghai company ultimately sent Kahlon $50 million to invest in Musk’s business, according to court records. SpaceX had the deal canceled after the plan became public.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.

President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. senator, and a state attorney general.

Real estate experts say claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.

But if administration officials continue the campaign, mortgage records show there’s another place they could look: Trump’s own Cabinet.

Underscoring how common the practice is, ProPublica found that at least three of Trump’s Cabinet members call multiple homes their primary residences on mortgages. We discovered the loans while examining financial disclosure forms, county real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has primary-residence mortgages in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has one primary-residence mortgage in Long Island and another in Washington, D.C., according to loan records.

In a flurry of interviews and rapid-fire posts on X, Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, has led the charge in accusing Trump opponents of mortgage fraud. “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation,” Pulte said last month.

A political donor to the president and heir to a housing company fortune, Pulte’s posts online tease big developments and criminal referrals, drawing reposts from Trump himself and promises of swift consequences. “Fraud will not be tolerated in President Trump’s housing market,” Pulte has warned.

Real estate experts told ProPublica that, in its bid to wrest control of the historically independent Fed and go after political enemies, the Trump administration has mischaracterized mortgage rules. Its justification for launching criminal investigations, they said, could also apply to the Trump Cabinet members.

All three Cabinet members denied wrongdoing. In a statement, a White House spokesperson said: “This is just another hit piece from a left-wing dark money group that constantly attempts to smear President Trump’s incredible Cabinet members. Unlike [Fed Gov.] Lisa ‘Corrupt’ Cook who blatantly and intentionally committed mortgage fraud, Secretary DeRemer, Secretary Duffy, and Administrator Zeldin own multiple residences, and they have followed the law and they are fully compliant with all ethical obligations.”

Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms than for a second home or an investment property. That includes better interest rates and the ability to borrow more money.

The idea is that borrowers are more likely to pay back — and less likely to default on — a loan attached to the home they actually live in. That makes those loans less risky for lenders. Interest rates are typically a quarter- to a half-point lower for primary mortgages, according to Pulte. On the low end, that could save around $75 each month over the life of a 30-year, 5% interest, half-million-dollar loan — or a total of around $25,000.

Standard mortgage documents commonly include an occupancy clause that requires the borrower to use the property as their principal residence for at least a year. They also include a section where borrowers can check a box when the mortgage is for a second home.

Misrepresenting occupancy status is not rare, according to a widely cited 2023 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. In interviews, real estate lawyers said that mortgage lenders are typically well aware of their clients’ other loans and sometimes even encourage the primary-residence language for second homes.

They also pointed to a mundane reason that innocent mistakes are common: Homebuyers simply sign stacks of forms without reading them.

“Few consumers understand this issue, and if there is someone at fault here, it is likely the loan officer who likely advised them to sign up for this loan that obviously wasn’t for their primary residence,” said real estate lawyer Doug Miller. “Loan officers who are competing for business will often quote lower rates in order to get a customer’s business.”

Mortgage fraud is rarely prosecuted, according to real estate lawyers and federal sentencing data. Pulte has pointed to a case from 2016 in which a California woman was found guilty of obtaining multiple loans for condos that she falsely stated would be her primary residence. But that case had an added layer of fraud: The woman never intended to live in the homes. She was secretly being paid because she had good credit to act as a front for the true buyer of the properties, to whom they were later transferred. She later defaulted on the loans, causing more than half a million dollars in losses for the lenders.

Lawyers told ProPublica that determining ill intent would be key to prosecute. “Fraud requires the borrower to be aware that the borrower was making a false representation,” said Jon Goodman, an attorney focused on real estate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein.

But Pulte has framed the issue in black-and-white terms: “Your second home is not your primary home,” he warned in one recent post on X.

By that standard, Trump’s labor secretary, Chavez-DeRemer, could be in the wrong.

In her financial disclosure form, she listed two mortgages on personal residences, both obtained in 2021. Mortgage records show her home is in Happy Valley, a city near Portland where Chavez-DeRemer served as mayor before being elected to represent the area in the U.S. House.

She and her husband, Shawn DeRemer, who leads an anesthesia company in Portland, refinanced their longtime Oregon home in January 2021. Two months later, the couple bought a newly built house near a golf course in Fountain Hills, Arizona.

The pair had previously enjoyed vacationing in Arizona, according to news reports and social media posts. (In one incident that made the news, Chavez-DeRemer was briefly hospitalized after a golf cart accident on her way back from watching a Sonoran Desert sunset.)

The mortgage agreement for the Arizona property required them to occupy the home as their “principal residence” for at least a year, barring “extenuating circumstances” or the lender allowing them to violate the stipulation.

A spokesperson for Chavez-DeRemer said that the couple bought the Arizona home with the intent to retire there, but then Chavez-DeRemer decided to run for Congress representing her Oregon district and did not move.

“This is nothing more than a left-wing rag inventing a story just to attack the Trump Administration. It’s common for families to refinance then buy a home with future plans in mind — trying to spin that as some type of scandal is pure nonsense,” said spokesperson Courtney Parella.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a White House official said that although DeRemer opted to stay in Oregon, her husband “continued to move forward with the process of becoming” an Arizona resident. Political donation records list his home in Oregon as recently as late 2023.

Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, and his wife also have two primary-residence mortgages, obtained a few years apart.

In August 2021, the Duffys, who have nine children, purchased a large $2 million home in Far Hills, New Jersey, about an hour’s drive from Manhattan, where Rachel Campos-Duffy works as a Fox News host.

They got a $1.6 million mortgage to purchase the property, and documents show it was a “principal residence” loan.

In February, after Duffy took the job in Trump’s cabinet, the couple bought another home, in Washington, D.C. Again, they got a principal-residence mortgage, this time for $1.76 million. Both Duffy and his wife are listed as borrowers on both mortgages, which came from the same bank.

It’s not clear where Sean Duffy lives most of the time, and a Department of Transportation spokesperson declined to answer questions about where Duffy and his wife each make their primary home. In late May, several months after they purchased the Washington home, “Fox & Friends Weekend” ran a segment in which Rachel Campos-Duffy cooked a “Make America Healthy Again” breakfast for host Steve Doocy. Sean Duffy and some of the couple’s children were also in the segment, and it was filmed in the New Jersey home.

Duffy’s spokesperson said in a statement that after being confirmed, “Sean purchased a home in Washington D.C. where he works full-time. The home in DC is not a rental, investment or vacation property. The same bank holds both mortgages and was fully informed of Secretary Duffy’s new employment location and need for a DC residence.”

A White House spokesperson said, “The bank, not the Secretary, determined and classified both mortgages as primary residences.”

Like the Duffys, Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, and his wife also have two concurrent primary-residence mortgages.

One, obtained in 2007, is on a home in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, which Zeldin represented in Congress for several years. Last year, Zeldin and his wife obtained a second mortgage, for $712,500, on a property in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the EPA’s headquarters. Both are primary-residence mortgages.

An EPA spokesperson said in a statement that Zeldin’s primary residence was previously on Long Island but is now in Washington. The spokesperson didn’t respond to questions about where his wife lives. “Administrator Zeldin followed ALL steps to complete the move in accordance with all laws, rules, and contracts, notifying his mortgage company, insurance company, and local government,” the spokesperson said. “EVERY ‘I’ was dotted and ‘t’ was crossed 1000% by the book without exception.”

The dual mortgages identified by ProPublica among Trump’s cabinet secretaries resemble the loans obtained by U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, whom Trump accused of mortgage fraud.

In May, Pulte referred Schiff to the Justice Department for taking out a primary-residence mortgage in Maryland, for a home he purchased in 2003 after being elected to the House, while also claiming his primary home was in Burbank, California, in the district he represented. Schiff and his wife refinanced the Maryland home several times as a primary residence, Pulte noted, until a 2020 refinance in which they reclassified it as a secondary home.

“Schiff appears to have falsified records in order to receive favorable loan terms,” Pulte concluded in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Representatives for Schiff called the allegations “transparently false” and said his lenders had “full knowledge of the senator’s year-round bicoastal work obligations” and “his use of two homes for that reason.” Schiff, according to his office, navigated the two mortgages in consultation with a House lawyer.

Pulte made similar allegations in a criminal referral about New York Attorney General Letitia James, alleging she may have committed fraud by getting a primary-residence mortgage for a home in Virginia, even though her position required her to live in New York. Her lawyer has said James helped a family member buy the property and notified the mortgage broker at the time that it would not be her primary residence. James became one of Trump’s top political enemies after she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022. Representatives for James have called the fraud claims made against her politically motivated and false. (Pulte did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Pulte’s most consequential allegations thus far were made against Cook, a Federal Reserve governor. Trump has been going after Fed Chair Jerome Powell for months for not lowering interest rates, even raising the specter that he would take the unprecedented step of attempting to fire the chair. Pulte’s criminal referral against Cook presented Trump with another avenue for bending the traditionally independent Fed to his will, securing a majority of the Fed’s board by firing Cook, a move that Cook has sued to block.

Pulte pointed to mortgage records that show that within just a couple of weeks, Cook signed primary-residence mortgages for homes in Michigan and Georgia. Legal experts said the close proximity was a red flag but that much was still unknown, including Cook’s intent and what her lenders were told. Pulte also flagged a third property, in Massachusetts, that Cook represented as a second home in mortgage documents but as an investment property in subsequent financial disclosures. Investment properties can be hit with higher mortgage rates than second homes.

“3 strikes and you’re out,” he posted on X.

Cook’s lawyers have denied that she committed mortgage fraud but have not provided a detailed explanation of the context for the various mortgages. They argued in court this week that her loans cannot be legally used as grounds to terminate her.

The Justice Department has begun investigating all three Trump foes singled out in Pulte’s referrals, according to news reports. The department has issued subpoenas in Cook’s case, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

ProPublica’s review of mortgage agreements by Trump cabinet officials shows that some made clear to lenders they were purchasing second homes.

When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for example, got a mortgage for his home near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the agreement included a rider making it clear he would be using it as a second home.

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. “So lives have been saved.”

In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.

“Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe — saving real lives,” Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. “This isn’t a game. This is real.”

But there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.

The NSA itself has been inconsistent on how many plots it has helped prevent and what role the surveillance programs played. The agency has often made hedged statements that avoid any sweeping assertions about attacks thwarted.

A chart declassified by the agency in July, for example, says that intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions “has contributed to the [U.S. government’s] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad” — a much different claim than asserting that the programs have been responsible for thwarting 54 attacks.

NSA officials have mostly repeated versions of this wording.

When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July, for instance, he referred to “54 different terrorist-related activities,” 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided “material support” to terrorism.

But the NSA has not always been so careful.

During Alexander’s speech in Las Vegas, a slide in an accompanying slideshow read simply “54 ATTACKS THWARTED.”

And in a recent letter to NSA employees, Alexander and John Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director, wrote that the agency has “contributed to keeping the U.S. and its allies safe from 54 terrorist plots.” (The letter was obtained by reporter Kevin Gosztola from a source with ties to the intelligence community. The NSA did not respond when asked to authenticate it.)

Asked for clarification of the surveillance programs’ record, the NSA declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?” Leahy said at the hearing. “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”

“Yes,” Alexander replied, without elaborating.

It’s impossible to assess the role NSA surveillance played in the 54 cases because, while the agency has provided a full list to Congress, it remains classified.

Officials have openly discussed only a few of the cases (see below), and the agency has identified only one — involving a San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support the militant group Al Shabab — in which NSA surveillance played a dominant role.

The surveillance programs at issue fall into two categories: The collection of metadata on all American phone calls under the Patriot Act, and the snooping of electronic communications targeted at foreigners under a 2007 surveillance law. Alexander has said that surveillance authorized by the latter law provided “the initial tip” in roughly half of the 54 cases. The NSA has not released examples of such cases.

After reading the full classified list, Leahy concluded the NSA’s surveillance has some value but still questioned the agency’s figures.

“We’ve heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted” by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. “That’s plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs.”

The origins of the “54” figure go back to a House Intelligence Committee hearing on June 18, less than two weeks after the Guardian’s publication of the first story based on documents leaked by Snowden.

At that hearing, Alexander said, “The information gathered from these programs provided the U.S. government with critical leads to help prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world.” He didn’t specify what “events” meant. Pressed by Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., Alexander said the NSA would send a more detailed breakdown to the committee.

Speaking in Baltimore the next week, Alexander gave an exact figure: 54 cases “in which these programs contributed to our understanding, and in many cases, helped enable the disruption of terrorist plots in the U.S. and in over 20 countries throughout the world.”

But members of Congress have repeatedly ignored the distinctions and hedges.

The websites of the Republicans and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee include pages titled, “54 Attacks in 20 Countries Thwarted By NSA Collection.”

And individual congressmen have frequently cited the figure in debates around NSA surveillance.

• Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga., who is also on the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement in July referring to “54 terrorist plots that have been foiled by the NSA programs.” Asked about the figure, Westmoreland spokeswoman Leslie Shedd told ProPublica that “he was citing declassified information directly from the National Security Agency.”
• Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, issued a statement in July saying “the programs in question have thwarted 54 specific plots, many targeting Americans on American soil.”
• Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., issued his own statement the next day: “The Amash amendment would have eliminated Section 215 of the Patriot Act which we know has thwarted 54 terrorist plots against the US (and counting).” (The amendment, which aimed to bar collection of Americans’ phone records, was narrowly defeated in the House.)
• Mike Rogers, the Intelligence Committee chairman who credited the surveillance programs with thwarting 54 attacks on the House floor, repeated the claim to Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face the Nation” in July.”You just heard what he said, senator,” Schieffer said, turning to Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., an NSA critic. “Fifty-six terror plots here and abroad have been thwarted by the NSA program. So what’s wrong with it, then, if it’s managed to stop 56 terrorist attacks? That sounds like a pretty good record.” Asked about Rogers’ remarks, House Intelligence Committee spokeswoman Susan Phalen said in a statement: “In 54 specific cases provided by the NSA, the programs stopped actual plots or put terrorists in jail before they could effectuate further terrorist plotting.  These programs save lives by disrupting attacks. Sometimes the information is found early in the planning, and sometimes very late in the planning. But in all those cases these people intended to kill innocent men and women through the use of terror.”
• Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., went even further in a town hall meeting in August. Responding to a question about the NSA vacuuming up Americans’ phone records, he said the program had “been used 54 times to be able to interrupt 54 different terrorist plots here in the United States that had originated from overseas in the past eight years. That’s documented.”
• The same day, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., who sits on the Intelligence Committee, defended the NSA at a town hall meeting with constituents in Cranston, R.I. “I know that these programs have been directly effective in thwarting and derailing 54 terrorist attacks,” he said. Asked about Langevin’s comments, spokeswoman Meg Fraser said in an email, “The committee was given information from NSA on August 1 that clearly indicated they considered the programs in question to have been used to help disrupt 54 terrorist events. That is the information the Congressman relied on when characterizing the programs at his town hall.”

Wenstrup, Heck and Lankford did not respond to requests for comment.

The claims have also appeared in the media. ABC News, CNN and the New York Times have all repeated versions of the claim that more than 50 plots have been thwarted by the programs.

The NSA has publicly identified four of the 54 cases. They are:

• The case of Basaaly Moalin, the San Diego man convicted of sending $8,500 to Somalia to support Al Shabab, the terrorist group that has taken responsibility for the attack on a Kenyan mall last month. The NSA has said its collection of American phone records allowed it to determine that a U.S. phone was in contact with a Shabab figure, which in turn led them to Moalin. NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has argued that the NSA could have gotten a court order to get the phone records in question and that the case does not justify the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records.
• The case of Najibullah Zazi, who in 2009 plotted to bomb the New York subway system. The NSA has said that an email it intercepted to an account of a known Al Qaeda figure in Pakistan allowed authorities to identify and ultimately capture Zazi. But an Associated Press examination of the case concluded that, again, the NSA’s account of the case did not show the need for the new warrantless powers at issue in the current debate. “Even before the surveillance laws of 2007 and 2008, the FBI had the authority to — and did, regularly — monitor email accounts linked to terrorists,” the AP reported.
• A case involving David Coleman Headley, the Chicago man who helped plan the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack. Intelligence officials have said that NSA surveillance helped thwart a subsequent plot involving Headley to attack a Danish newspaper. A ProPublica examination of that episode concluded that it was a tip from British intelligence, rather than NSA surveillance, that led authorities to Headley.
• A case involving a purported plot to attack the New York Stock Exchange. This convoluted episode involves three Americans, including Khalid Ouazzani of Kansas City, Mo., who pleaded guilty in 2010 to bank fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda. An FBI official said in June that NSA surveillance helped in the case “to detect a nascent plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.” But no one has been charged with crimes related to that or any other planned attack. (Ouazzani was sentenced to 14 years last month.) The Kansas City Star reported that one of the men in the case had “pulled together a short report with the kind of public information easily available from Google Earth, tourist maps and brochures” and that his contact in Yemen “tore up the report, ‘threw it in the street’ and never showed it to anyone.” Court records also suggest that the men in Yemen that Ouazzani sent over $20,000 to may have been scamming him and spent some of the money on personal expenses.

Originally published on ProPublica

For more from ProPublica on the NSA, read about the agency’s campaign to crack Internet security, a look at the surveillance reforms Obama supported before he was president, and a fact-check on claims about the NSA and Sept. 11.