Stephen Moore, visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, stands for a photograph following a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, March 22, 2019. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Court records from Stephen Moore's divorce paint President Donald Trump's nominee for the Federal Reserve Board as a brazen philanderer who openly talked about his mistress in front of his kids — and then continued shorting his ex-wife on tens of thousands of dollars of alimony and child support even after a judge held him in contempt of court. "I have two women, and what's really bad is when they fight over you," Moore said to the couple's children in front of his wife Allison "at their son's graduation ceremony," court records claim. Other court records show Moore, who is a distinguished visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has a $75,000 IRS tax lien against him for unpaid taxes on his 2014 filing. The lien relates to a deduction he took for both alimony and child support to his ex-wife. He has said he is contesting that amount.

Despite that and the revelations from the Moores' divorce, Trump continues to back Moore's nomination to the Fed, according to a senior White House official who spoke to CNBC. "POTUS completely behind him," that official said in an email, using the acronym for "president of the United States." The conduct by Moore, a conservative economist, as alleged by his former wife Allison Moore, stands in sharp contrast to his publicly published positions on marriage. "What is irrefutable is that marriage with a devoted husband and wife in the home is a far better social program than food stamps, Medicaid, public housing or even all of them combined," Moore wrote in a 2014 Washington Times article in which he contended the nation's economic success would depend on a "culture of virtue," strong families and parents, and a resurgence of the Protestant work ethic. "Name a government program that can take the place of a father." But more than three years before that, Moore was not acting like a devoted husband, Allison Moore said in a divorce action filed in August 2010 after two decades of marriage. And then when the couple split, she claimed, he did not pay her — or their three children — what he had agreed to, she said. It was only after a judge's contempt order, and a threat in that order to have Moore arrested so he could purge that contempt, that he began paying Allison alimony and child support. Allison and Stephen Moore on Monday both issued statements using friendly language about each other, with Allison saying they had "reconciled through our divorce."

A nomination already under fire

Trump on March 22 said he would nominate Moore to the Fed's board of governors, after he read a Wall Street Journal column Moore had co-authored entitled "The Fed is a Threat to Growth." The column slammed the hike in interest rates by the central bank in the latter half of 2018, which Moore claimed was preventing the economy from maximizing the growth it should be realizing from Trump's financial policies.

A bitter end, and then a reconciliation