Fannie Mae fired ethics staff investigating Pulte's access to Letitia James's mortgage records

On October 30, 2025, Fannie Mae fired about a dozen members of its ethics and internal investigations unit, including Chief Ethics Officer Suzanne Libby, days after General Counsel Danielle McCoy was pressured to resign. The unit had received internal complaints that senior officials directed staff to access the confidential mortgage records of New York Attorney General Letitia James and other prominent Democrats, and had referred its findings to the FHFA's Office of Inspector General, which passed them to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Virginia -- the same office that later filed a mortgage-fraud indictment against James. The FHFA's own acting inspector general, who forwarded that referral, was separately asked to step down.

Around the same time, senior Fannie Mae executives -- including Malloy Evans, senior vice president of the company's single-family mortgage division -- were forced out after raising internal alarms that Lauren Smith, the company's head of marketing and a Pulte ally acting "per Director Pulte's ask," had shared confidential, competitive mortgage-pricing data with rival Freddie Mac. Evans had warned in writing that the disclosure was "very problematic" and could expose the company to allegations of collusion on mortgage rates, and asked the company's top attorney to weigh in on the legal exposure. Smith was not disciplined and kept her position.

At the time, FHFA Director Bill Pulte publicly described the ethics-unit firings as part of a routine "standard business layoff of over 62 people, across the COO, Information Technology, 'DEI,' and other divisions." Wall Street Journal reporting published in late October 2025, corroborated independently by Associated Press reporting in November 2025 that reviewed internal Fannie Mae emails, found that framing was cover: the ethics-unit firings came directly in response to the unit's own investigation of Pulte, and the executives who raised the Freddie Mac data-sharing concern were removed for having done so, not for any performance or restructuring reason.

Updates

2025-11-20 — House Oversight Democrats demanded FHFA records [4]

House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia sent FHFA Director Bill Pulte a letter demanding records related to the ethics-unit firings, alleging the agency had been weaponized to target the administration's political opponents.