Although he was beaten to the jump when interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert resigned, Donald Trump wanted Siebert out of office to the point of claiming publicly that he had fired him. But Siebert wasn’t a Biden holdover. He had been nominated, just months earlier, for the permanent position by Trump himself.

Trump has demonstrated a concerning level of personal interest in a number of cases that are under investigation in the Eastern District. There is a matter involving former FBI Director Jim Comey, whom Trump fired during his first term in office and has maintained a high stakes grudge match with ever since. There are also at least two of the “mortgage fraud” cases Trump is now using to go after his self-proclaimed enemies, with an assist from Bill Pulte, Trump’s director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who has access to mortgage documentation. The cases center around claims that people, notably all folks who’ve managed to get on the president’s bad side, engaged in mortgage fraud by making false statements when they purchased second homes. Pulte has provided the “evidence” in at least some of the cases. 

Siebert fell under fire when he declined to indict a case involving New York’s Attorney General Letitia James. (She’s on Trump’s enemies list because she prosecuted his company for fraud and has also led the charge on much of the litigation by state attorneys general against his new administration.) The office also appears to have a mortgage fraud case open on California Senator Adam Schiff.

A third mortgage fraud allegation explains why Siebert might have balked at prosecuting New York’s Attorney General. It involves Fed Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump announced he would fire from that role after claiming she had mortgages on two homes and designated both as her permanent residence. Reuters reviewed the documents and determined that the loan estimate for an Atlanta property acquired in May 2021 showed that Cook had in fact designated it as a “vacation home.” That contradicts the allegations of fraud. With evidence like that, it’s easy to understand why prosecutors would shy away from indicting a case.