An appellate court refused on Monday to align with President Donald Trump’s dismissal of Federal Reserve Board governor Lisa Cook, who faced allegations of unproven mortgage fraud. In response, the DOJ has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for another administrative stay.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, through a 2-1 ruling this week, concluded that the Trump administration did not fulfill the “stringent requirements for a stay pending appeal” concerning a lower court’s injunction that prevented Cook’s removal.

Only U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, appointed by Trump, dissented, stating he would have supported a stay.

Katsas articulated his perspective that Cook’s “apparent misrepresentations […] in applying for home mortgages,” as mentioned in Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte’s DOJ referral, might justify “for-cause removal from office,” even though the alleged misconduct occurred before her board appointment.

The circuit judge critiqued U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, a 2021 President Joe Biden appointee, as “mistaken” for ruling otherwise, also questioning the view that Cook “enjoys a constitutionally protected property interest in her office.”

“In my view, both holdings are mistaken, and the equitable balance here tips in favor of the government,” he wrote.

Katsas’ view featured prominently in U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s request to SCOTUS for an administrative stay. In fact, the judge was shouted out by name on the second page.

“To this day, Cook has never attempted to reconcile these representations or offered any substantive justification,” the DOJ said. “The district court nonetheless issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Cook, and a divided D.C. Circuit panel refused to stay that order.”

“As Judge Katsas’s dissent explained,” the government continued, “those decisions flout many strands of this Court’s precedents, from removal to due process to the equities. The injunction should be stayed.”

Before the D.C. Circuit’s rejection, the Trump administration had asked that the appellate court put Cook on the outside looking in ahead of a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee.

The government cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent order that allowed, for the time being, Trump to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, with potential implications for the SCOTUS precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor that Law&Crime previously covered as it related to Cook’s case.

Claiming Cobb made “a series of legal errors” in an “extraordinary” affront to Trump’s “exercise of his Article II authority,” the administration claimed “evidence” that Cook “applied for two loans for her personal benefit, and was able to obtain favorable interest rates by misrepresenting where she lived” put her “trustworthiness” in question and was sufficient for establishing “cause” for firing.

Sauer hammered away on these points again in his brief — that SCOTUS should issue an administrative stay as it did in the Slaughter firing case and that Trump’s determinations about Cook’s “conduct, ability, fitness, or competence” to serve are within the “President’s unreviewable discretion.”

While acknowledging that removal without cause and removal based on mere policy disagreement aren’t permitted under the law, the administration nonetheless maintains Trump’s cited “cause” is unquestionable.

Put another way, an ally of the president can make a criminal referral that the president then relies on to establish “cause” and that determination of “cause” can’t be reviewed by the courts, according to the DOJ.

“The President’s strong concerns about the appearance of mortgage fraud, based on facially contradictory representations made to obtain mortgages by someone whose job is to set interest rates that affect Americans’ mortgages, satisfies any conception of cause,” the brief said. “That is especially true here, where Cook has not disputed any material fact or offered any plausible justification for her conduct.”

As in other cases, the DOJ asserted that “[e]ven if judicial review of the President’s stated cause” for firing Cook “were available,” the courts must still be “highly deferential” to Trump.

“That the Federal Reserve Board plays a uniquely important role in the American economy only heightens the government’s and the public’s interest in ensuring that an ethically compromised member does not continue wielding its vast powers,” the filing said. “Put simply, the President may reasonably determine that interest rates paid by the American people should not be set by a Governor who appears to have lied about facts material to the interest rates she secured for herself—and refuses to explain the apparent misrepresentations.”

“This Court should stay the district court’s deeply flawed preliminary injunction and should grant an immediate administrative stay,” the government concluded.

Cook’s attorneys have said that allowing Trump to “unlawfully remove Governor Cook on unsubstantiated and vague allegations” she denies “would endanger the stability of our financial system and undermine the rule of law” — by green-lighting political interference at the independent Federal Reserve as the president has openly pressured Fed chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.