Taking on the Fed, Trump Combines Retribution Tactics With a Power Play

Since taking office again, President Trump has aggressively sought to expand his power, asserting a right to override spending decisions by Congress, dismiss leaders of traditionally independent agencies and push through legal and even constitutional barriers on issues including immigration and birthright citizenship.

At the same time, he has used the government to pursue his campaign of retribution against political and personal foes, instigating criminal investigations, demanding big payments, revoking security clearances and dismissing federal employees.

But when Mr. Trump called for the resignation of a Federal Reserve governor this week, it marked the merging of those two defining features of his second term. He was using the tactics he has employed in targeting his enemies in the service of an attempt to exert control over the central bank, which by law is structured to maintain substantial independence from political influence.

Mr. Trump called for the resignation of the Fed governor, Lisa Cook, after Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a key political ally of the president, said that his office had investigated Ms. Cook and found that she appeared to have falsified bank documents to obtain favorable mortgage loan terms. His agency referred the matter to the Justice Department, which confirmed it received the referral.

Mr. Trump’s move to push out Ms. Cook, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and specialist in international economics, came as he pursues a pressure campaign to install new leaders at the Fed who will heed his demand for lower interest rates. Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked and threatened to fire the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, and accused Mr. Powell of mismanaging the renovation of the central bank’s headquarters in Washington.

Mr. Trump has only limited ability to fire an official from the central bank, a protection recently reaffirmed by the Supreme Court. Policymakers on the Board of Governors can be removed only for “cause,” which legal experts define as breaking the law or gross misconduct.

“If you ‘steal’ money, any amount, you should be prosecuted,” Mr. Pulte said on social media on Thursday. “Period.”

In her response to the allegations, Ms. Cook said she had “no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet.” She added that her mortgage applications were from before she joined the board.

The targeting of Ms. Cook, however, fits into a broader pattern by the Trump administration of moving to oust government officials who exercise independence, voice dissent or were engaged in past inquiries into Mr. Trump. It is also another example of how Mr. Trump and his aides are invoking the so-called unitary executive theory, which undercuts traditional guardrails on his power by asserting that the Constitution gives the president nearly unchecked authority over the entire executive branch.

Mitchel Sollenberger, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has written about executive power, said Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign against the Fed amounted to a “natural continuation of the unitary executive theory.”

“I do think this isn’t just the natural conclusion or evolution, which it is, but you’re seeing the powers of government being used for retribution in a way that we haven’t seen before,” Dr. Sollenberger said, adding that the endpoint could be “no more independence” in the federal government.

“It’s unprecedented, it’s shocking and it frankly should be deeply troubling,” Dr. Sollenberger said.

Mr. Trump has taken a much more aggressive approach during his second term to using the powers of the federal government to crush dissent or investigate political foes, including law firms, news organizations, universities and government functionaries.

Mr. Pulte has played a role in other cases. He has conducted mortgage-fraud investigations into Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who as a House member led congressional inquiries into Mr. Trump during his first term, and Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, who won a civil fraud trial against Mr. Trump before he returned to office.

Mr. Trump has also fired inspectors general throughout the federal government and installed loyalists throughout the Justice Department, which is investigating a host of Democrats and others who have opposed him or been associated with previous investigations into him.

Now surrounded by political allies willing to turn his impulses into policy, Mr. Trump has dismissed prosecutors involved in bringing the criminal cases against him by a special counsel, as well as those who investigated rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The intelligence community under Mr. Trump has sought to show that former President Barack Obama and his aides wrongly sought to tie Mr. Trump to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor. They have said some of Mr. Obama’s officials and possibly the former president himself should be held criminally liable.

The administration targeted public critics of Mr. Trump, like Chris Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official who said the 2020 election had been conducted securely.

And recently, Mr. Trump has unleashed his fury at those assigned to independently assess the economy. When the jobs report for July was released this month showing a slowdown in hiring, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that the numbers were rigged and fired the head of the government agency that produces them.

After Mr. Pulte made his allegations against Ms. Cook, Mr. Trump posted on social media that she must “resign, now!!!”

“I see it fitting into his use of threats of questionable legality — but very practical implications of risk for the person at the receiving end of the threat — to twist people’s arms and get them to do what he wants,” said Daniel Farber, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written about presidential power. “It does fit into this battle of independence of agencies and independence of civil services and institutions he wants to bring to heel.”

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.