By The Briefcase Team | Thursday, June 25, 2026 | 4 min read

Good morning. The man who runs your mortgage market also runs the CIA now. We are not joking. And the inspector general who was looking into how he uses mortgage data just got fired. We have things to talk about.

Last week, the acting inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency was removed from his post. His name is Joe Allen. He was in the middle of investigating whether senior officials at the housing regulator had directed staff to access mortgage records belonging to critics of the President.

The man whose conduct was reportedly under review is Bill Pulte. Pulte runs the FHFA. He is also chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored entities that touch roughly half of every mortgage in the United States. And as of June 2, he is also the acting Director of National Intelligence, overseeing the CIA, the NSA, and parts of the FBI.

You read that correctly. One man. The mortgage market and the intelligence community. Simultaneously.

We are going to slow down and walk through this.

According to reporting first carried by Weekly Real Estate News and picked up across the wires this week, Fannie Mae's ethics office received internal complaints alleging that senior FHFA officials directed staff to pull mortgage documents on critics of President Trump.

The names that have surfaced as targets of the records review: New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is currently prosecuting a civil case the President personally dislikes. Senator Adam Schiff, of California. And Lisa Cook, a sitting governor of the Federal Reserve.

Pulte then publicly surfaced mortgage-document allegations against all three. The records did not come from a leak. They came from inside the agency he runs.

The ethics office referred the matter up to the FHFA Office of Inspector General. The OIG passed it to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Then the acting Inspector General got fired.

Three Fannie Mae ethics-office personnel were also dismissed: Suzanne Libby, Danielle McCoy, and Joe Allen. The official reason, per Pulte, was "DEI involvement." This is the same Joe Allen who was investigating the mortgage-data complaints. A man cannot investigate his own boss after he no longer has a desk.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee roughly $7 trillion in mortgages. Every loan they touch carries the borrower's name, address, income, employment, assets, and signature. It is the most sensitive consumer financial dataset in the country, and it sits inside two companies whose chairman now also runs the intelligence apparatus.

There has historically been a wall between the people who supervise the mortgage system and the people who collect intelligence on Americans. That wall exists for a reason. We have specifically designed our system so that the federal officials who can see your loan file cannot also see your phone records, and vice versa. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 were both written after the last time someone tried this.

This week, that wall has one man straddling it. And the inspector general whose job was to make sure the wall held just got fired.

Calling the ethics-office firings a DEI matter is a tell. Inspectors general are not DEI positions. They are independent watchdogs created by Congress under the Inspector General Act of 1978 precisely to prevent the people running an agency from punishing the people checking on the agency. Removing an acting IG mid-investigation is the corporate-governance equivalent of firing the auditor on the morning of the audit.

It is also legally complicated. Under a 2022 amendment to the IG Act, the President must give Congress 30 days' written notice and a substantive reason before removing an IG. "DEI" is not a substantive reason. It is a slogan.

Three things. First, whether the House Financial Services Committee opens its own inquiry. Ranking members sent a letter on June 5 demanding answers about Pulte's dual roles. Second, whether the EDVA U.S. Attorney's office continues the referral. Third, whether anyone at Fannie or Freddie shareholder meetings raises the obvious question: what fiduciary risk does it create when your chairman is also the Director of National Intelligence?

We will be watching.