It was roughly two months ago when the public learned that Donald Trump’s Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair. Even by contemporary standards, the whole endeavor was ridiculous: There was no credible evidence of wrongdoing, and it seemed rather obvious that the administration was targeting Powell because he was on the White House’s growing revenge list.
The pushback to the investigation was swift, broad and bipartisan, with several congressional Republicans agreeing that it was a mistake to pursue the Fed chair with trumped-up charges.
Late Friday, the case, such as it was, unraveled. MS NOW reported:
A federal judge has quashed the Justice Department’s subpoenas targeting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, according to a court filing unsealed Friday — a major blow to the Trump administration’s criminal investigation into the central bank’s leader.
In a remarkable decision, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that ‘a mountain of evidence’ suggested that ‘the Government served these subpoenas on the [Federal Reserve] Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning.’ Boasberg added that federal prosecutors ‘produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime,’ calling the Trump administration’s case ‘so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.’
The jurist kept going, highlighting the fact that the misguided crusade against Powell fit a “pattern,” with many of the president’s perceived political foes facing Justice Department scrutiny, not because of the evidence but because of the administration’s retaliatory agenda.
“Being perceived as the President’s adversary has become risky in recent years,” Boasberg wrote. “In his second term, Trump has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute such people, and the Department’s prosecutors have listened.”
Broadly speaking, there are a few elements to consider as the dust settles on the ruling and the White House weighs its future options.
First, the president really ought to be asking himself right now whether it was a smart move to tap a former Fox News host to serve as the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital. Jeanine Pirro’s failed effort against Powell was humiliating, but it coincided with a similarly humiliating effort to indict Democratic veterans in Congress who advised service members to follow the law, which coincided with a separate failed criminal investigation into Joe Biden.
In fact, Pirro’s office has lost so many closely watched cases with such regularity that it’s been challenging to keep up with them.
Second, in an unusual press conference following the apparent demise of her case against Powell, the Republican prosecutor made little effort to claim she had evidence of wrongdoing, but said she wanted to go after the Fed chair anyway, just in case some undetermined crimes might have been committed.
Pirro added, “Exonerating anyone without an investigation is not how our criminal justice system works.” But the judge didn’t exonerate Powell so much as he acknowledged the inconvenient fact that the U.S. attorney’s office was pursuing a baseless case.
As the press conference started to wrap up, Pirro was asked about the frequency of federal grand juries rejecting her efforts. Her furious response offered fresh evidence that she’s ill-suited for the position she’s in.
Finally, there’s the road ahead. Given the circumstances, there’s a silver lining for the White House to the rejection of the baseless case against Powell: The sooner this case goes away, the easier it will be for Senate Republicans to move forward with Kevin Warsh’s nomination to succeed Powell. All Pirro had to do was accept Friday’s outcome, scrap plans for an appeal and move on to other priorities.
The prosecutor instead signaled plans for the opposite path, which dovetailed with the president publishing a hysterical tirade to his social media platform, condemning Boasberg and accusing Powell of wrongdoing in the vaguest ways possible.
This fiasco, in other words, is ongoing. Watch this space.
