Axios reports Trump’s Department of Justice has given up hope of chasing the prosecution of former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday.
“We’re not reopening a criminal investigation into him,” Blanche said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg.
Earlier this week, Blanche commented on a report released by the Fed’s Office of Inspector General that found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Powell connected to cost overruns related to the central bank’s building renovation project, a $2.4 billion endeavor. While the report identified a series of missteps aggravating renovation costs, it did not find malice.
Blanche said he was satisfied with the report, but that Powell hadn’t appropriately overseen the project. Axios reports Blanche said Powell “did not act appropriately as far as oversight,” but distinguished those failures from potential criminal conduct.
“Making mistakes and not having any sort of oversight over the folks doing billion-dollar projects isn’t necessarily a crime,” said Blanche.
News of this is in opposition to Trump’s seeming eagerness to harass Powell, who has publicly contract corrected Trump before live cameras. Trump called for Powell to resign from his post or face legal action Wednesday, hours after the Federal Reserve inspector general report exonerated Powell of criminality.
“If he doesn’t resign, he should be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government, for either corruption or incompetence, both of which are completely unacceptable,” Trump threatened.
Powell’s term as chair expired in May, reports Axios, but he took the “unusual step of staying on as a governor,” because he would not leave until the criminal investigation was “well and truly over, with transparency and finality.”
Powell later updated his reasons, saying that the administration’s broader legal actions against the Fed had left him “no choice but to stay.”
Fed spokesperson declined to comment when questioned by Axios.
In April, Trump was furious with Powell for refusing to lower interest rates as much as Trump wanted. And major economists like Paul Krugman agreed with Powell, stressing that for the Fed, interest rate cuts are a tool to be saved for major economic downturns.
But Trump called for Powell to be fired before his term as Fed chair ended on May 15.
Even then, the Trump-dominated (DOJ) had been investigating claims that Powell lied to Congress — claims that Trump’s critics are describing as baseless, despite biting critiques from conservatives that Trump’s DOJ’s Powell probe was petty and devoid of merit.
“The Trump Administration’s self-destructive investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has achieved a new level of farce,” said National Review journalist Andrew C. McCarthy in April.