The lawyer squaring off against Trump in Fed fight

When President Donald Trump abruptly announced last week that he had fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, a legendary Washington lawyer quickly stepped into the arena.

Abbe Lowell has represented New York Attorney General Letitia James, Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and several other high-profile political clients, both Republicans and Democrats.

Now he is at the center of Trump’s bid to expand his authority over federal regulators.

Before Trump announced he was firing Cook on Aug. 25, no American president had ever tried to unilaterally remove a Fed governor, pushing Cook and the central bank into uncharted legal territory.

But for Lowell, a fixture in Washington legal circles for decades, fighting a presidential administration’s attempt to exert control over federal regulators is nothing new.

“I have basically challenged the overreach of federal agencies in every administration since Ronald Reagan’s,” Lowell said on MSNBC last month.

“Didn’t matter whether it’s a Democratic or Republican administration. If the government overreaches, then [the] lawyer’s job is to put the government in the right place,” he added.

Cook and James are some of the newer names of the lengthy client list Lowell has built over the years.

James won a civil fraud case against Trump and his family business in 2023. The penalty in the case — roughly $500 million — was thrown out last month.

That same month, the Trump Justice Department launched a federal grand jury investigation into James over alleged “mortgage fraud.”

The allegations against James were publicly leveled earlier this year by the same Trump ally, Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, who made the claims against Cook.

Lowell, not afraid to serve as the attack dog for his clients, has called the investigation into James “the most blatant and desperate example of this administration carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign.”

Lowell, 73, has also represented several other high-profile clients during his career, including Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and eldest daughter.

Kushner and Ivanka Trump retained Lowell during Trump’s first term to represent them in a special counsel probe of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Former Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., hired Lowell’s then-firm to defend him in a 2017 federal bribery case that ended in a mistrial. Menendez was convicted in a separate federal bribery case last year.

Lowell also defended Hunter Biden, who was convicted last year on federal gun related charges, before being pardoned by his father, former President Joe Biden.

Lowell also served as minority counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during impeachment proceedings against former President Bill Clinton in 1998.

But since Trump’s return, the bulk of Lowell’s clients have been individuals targeted by the Trump administration, giving him a familiar playbook as he takes on the White House in legal filings and in the courtroom.

“The difference,” he says, between the Trump administration and other administrations, is that the Trump White House overreaches “over and over again.”

“So I guess the bottom line is this is consistent with what I and the people I’m working with have always done. There’s just more of it to do,” Lowell said on NPR’s “Morning Edition” last month.

Following a familiar strategy in Cook’s case as in his others, Lowell quickly filed a lawsuit on her behalf last week after Trump moved to fire her over unsupported allegations of mortgage fraud.

“Nothing in these vague, unsubstantiated allegations has any relevance to Gov. Cook’s role at the Federal Reserve, and they in no way justify her removal from the Board,” Lowell said in a statement on Friday, after Pulte filed a second criminal referral against Cook with the Justice Department.

Lowell also sharply criticized the effort during a Friday court hearing on the matter that ended without an immediate decision.

A question in Cook’s case is whether the alleged mortgage fraud is sufficient for Trump to remove Cook “for cause,” which is the threshold under the Federal Reserve Act. Pulte first raised and has relentlessly promoted the mortgage fraud allegations.

“You can’t have Director Pulte’s crazy midnight tweets be the cause” for which Cook is removed, Lowell said during the hearing.

Earlier this year, Lowell left Winston & Strawn, where he was a partner, and founded his own firm, Lowell & Associates. His boutique firm has quickly developed a roster of clients who have been targets of the Trump administration.

And he appears unlikely to stop taking on the administration anytime soon.

During the recent NPR interview, Lowell compared James’ case to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” noting “the famous line about a government that engages in what’s called doublespeak.”

“I mean, think about what the president is doing. He has an office in the Department of Justice that is called something about the anti-weaponization office,” he said, adding that “they are using that office to weaponize the Justice Department against the president’s adversaries.”

“I know we get inured to the excess of authority that is happening in the last six months, but this strikes at such – the heart of the rule of law that people should pay attention,” he said.