July 15, 2021

Julia Gordon
President
National Community Stabilization Trust
910 17th St. NW, Suite 810
Washington, D.C. 20006

Dear Ms. Gordon:

I am seeking your assistance in recovering your deleted tweets so that the Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (Committee) can fully evaluate your nomination for
Assistant Secretary for the Office of Housing and Commissioner of the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

As the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee responsible for vetting HUD nominees, I am
concerned by multiple tweets you have posted, including deleted tweets. The content of these
tweets raise serious concerns about your policy views and fitness for office. My Committee staff
have located some of your deleted tweets through publicly available databases of archived
tweets, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. However, it appears that these
databases are incomplete and, therefore, may not include all of the tweets you have deleted.
Because these recent, formerly public statements may shed light on how you would carry out
your duties as FHA Commissioner, it is critical that senators on this Committee quickly receive
information you deleted to allow us to fully assess your nomination to a senior leadership
position in the federal government.

Based on a review of your Twitter account, it is evident that you often utilized Twitter to
advance your views on housing policy. For example, on May 4, 2015, you wrote that “Shameless
Republicans pit two crucial affordable housing programs against each other” and linked to an
article describing how House Republicans had passed a bill redirecting money from the National
Housing Trust Fund to the HOME program.1 Likewise, on July 12, 2020, you praised Quicken
Loans for urging HUD to reconsider its 2020 proposed rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate
impact standard, indicating that you “hope[d] every other lender joins @QuickenLoans in
reaching out to HUD [because] this move is meaningfully anti-racist and a terrific example of
corporate allyship.”2

1
Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (May 4, 2015, 2020),
https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/595295213578547200; Shiv Rawal, Republicans In Congress Take Aim At
The National Housing Trust Fund, Think Progress (May 4, 2015), available at
https://web.archive.org/web/20150508232732/http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/04/3654419/national-
housing-trust-fund-republicans/.
2
Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (Jul. 12, 2020), https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/1282506756208373765. In
addition, with respect to the FHA, you wrote, among other things, that “[we] need a coordinated push at FHFA and
[FHA] to permit autoforbearance for borrowers 60+” and that Americans should not “Be Fooled by the FHA
‘Bailout’ Hysteria.” Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (Sept. 20, 2020),
You have also promoted troubling statements against law enforcement. For example, on May 31,
2020, you retweeted an inflammatory post that described police officers as “the people killing
us.”3 On that same date, you shared a tweet stating that “you’d think a country that can equip
every cop like a soldier could equip every doctor like a doctor.”4 Similarly, on June 3, 2020, you
retweeted a thread from the National Community Stabilization Trust (NCST)—the organization
you lead—indicating that NCST “mourns the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far
too many others who have died as a result of racialized police brutality” and that NCST stands in
solidarity with those “who seek to dismantle four hundred years of personal and structural
racism.”5 NCST’s apparent view that police departments are structurally racist institutions that
should be dismantled accords with a letter you published on NCST’s website on July 16, 2020, in
which you stated that, “We can only hope that the recent horrors of police violence and the
disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color has shown light on the fact that
these problems are not just outliers or one-offs, but that they stem from flawed and biased
systems that require structural change.”6 Likewise, on July 7, 2020, you boosted a thread from
the Center for American Progress that attempted to portray police officers as disproportionately
targeting and killing African Americans.7

In addition, you have tweeted or retweeted negative comments about your fellow Americans in
southern states and various public officials. On December 8, 2014, you retweeted a post asserting
that “Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats” and linked to
an article arguing that Democrats should stop trying to win elections in the South at the
congressional level because “[p]ractically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s
good about this country” and the “Democrats don’t need it anyway.”8

In a post that you apparently deleted, you amplified a tweet stating that a fly that landed on Vice
President Mike Pence’s head during the 2020 Vice Presidential Debates “is Mike Pence’s only
black friend.”9 You retweeted a post that referred to Senator Lindsey Graham as
“#LyingLindsey”10 and another that claimed he was “desperate.”11 You tweeted that “your head

https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/1307845909800255488; tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (Nov. 16, 2012),

https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/269545624934940673.
3
Retweet of @zackbornstein by Julia Gordon, Twitter (May 31, 2020),
https://twitter.com/ZackBornstein/status/1267141940547469312/retweets.
4
Retweet of @jeffbercovici by Julia Gordon, Twitter (May 31, 2020),
https://twitter.com/jeffbercovici/status/1266942532665016320/retweets.
5
Retweet of @_NCST by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Jul. 3, 2020),
https://twitter.com/_NCST/status/1268202015353643011/retweets.
6
Letter from Julia Gordon, President of NCST, National Community Stabilization Trust (Jul. 16, 2020),
https://www.stabilizationtrust.org/letter-from-julia-gordon-july-2020/.
7
Retweet of @amprog by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Jul. 7, 2016),
https://twitter.com/amprog/status/751066458373754880/retweets.
8
Retweet of @keithboykin by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Dec. 8, 2014),
https://twitter.com/keithboykin/status/541969655628578817/retweets; Michael Tomasky, Dems, It’s Time to Dump
Dixie, Daily Beast (Dec. 8, 2014), https://www.thedailybeast.com/dems-its-time-to-dump-dixie. The Daily Beast
article clarifies that Democrats, at the Presidential level, may still need to try to compete in Florida and Virginia, and
perhaps other states, to win the Electoral College.
9
Archived retweet of @subhah by Julia Gordon (Oct. 7, 2020),
https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/1314030866197348355.
10
Retweet of @meidastouch by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Sept. 25, 2020),
https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1309494377744445441/retweets.
11
Retweet of @mattmfm by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Oct. 14, 2020),
https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/1316527368371163144/retweets.

2
[was] exploding” because Senator Rand Paul voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,12 and
retweeted a post calling on members of the “#Resistance” to try to stop Senators Susan Collins,
Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, and Bob Corker from voting in favor of a “#taxscam.”13 And you also
propagated the allegation that President Donald Trump was betraying the United States to the
benefit of Russia, retweeting a post referring to members of the Trump family as “lying
traitors”14 and writing “How ‘bout that: Russians flock to U.S. real estate after Trump victory.”15

You also have published several tweets and retweets criticizing the Obama-Biden administration
for failing to take more liberal policy positions. For example, just days before President Obama
gave his 2014 State of the Union address you promoted a tweet that asked, “Why isn’t there a
progressive response to the [Obama-Biden] State of the Union?”16 You also tweeted that “The
Buck Stops with Obama on Tepid Financial Reform”17 and linked to an article arguing that the
“biggest disappointments [of the Obama-Biden administration] were failing to be more
aggressive on housing policy and failing to hold wrongdoers accountable in the aftermath of the
crisis” and that the “administration’s failure on financial regulatory reform may be the most
emblematic of the president’s halting leadership qualities.”18

Collectively, your recent tweets, an unknown number of which have since been deleted, raise
serious concerns about your policy views and fitness for office. Accordingly, to allow my fellow
Senators and me the opportunity to fully evaluate your nomination, I request that you request
your data from Twitter and produce to the Committee all tweets that have been deleted from your
Twitter account by no later than the close of business on July 22, 2021.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Pat Toomey
Ranking Member

cc: The Honorable Sherrod Brown, Chairman, Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and
Urban Affairs
The Honorable Marcia Fudge, Secretary, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

12
Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (Feb. 9, 2018), https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/962080113536983040.
13
Retweet of @normeisen by Julia Gordon (Dec. 14, 2017),
https://twitter.com/NormEisen/status/941414811417698304/retweets.
14
Retweet of @derekcressman by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Jul. 12, 2017),
https://twitter.com/DerekCressman/status/885187174659801088/retweets.
15
Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (Dec. 12, 2016), https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/808302983821803521.
16
Retweet of @matthewstoller by Julia Gordon, Twitter (Jan. 23, 2014),
https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/426456211932712961.
17
Tweet of Julia Gordon, Twitter (May 22, 2014), https://twitter.com/JRGordonDC/status/469496281430102016.
18
Jesse Eisinger, The Buck Stops with Obama on Tepid Financial Reform, ProPublica (May 21, 2014),
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-buck-stops-with-obama-on-tepid-financial-reform.