Did Jerome Powell Try to 'Strongarm' His Way out of a Criminal Investigation?

Powell's attorney warned his client would remain on the Federal Reserve Board after his term as chairman ends in May...unless, of course, Jeanine Pirro made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

As I have reported for months, the Trump Department of Justice is having a hell of a time securing criminal indictments from D.C.-based grand juries. Not only is Washington, D.C. the most Democratic city in the nation—a voter base from which grand jurors are selected without any vetting process to eliminate biased panelists—but activist groups host regular seminars in the nation’s capital advising potential jurors how to reject indictments sought by the DOJ.

Which is why the issuance of two grand jury subpoenas in January related to the DOJ’s investigation into the Federal Reserve represented a major score for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Prompted by a U.S. Senate inquiry into excessive cost overruns for the prolonged renovation of two Fed buildings in Washington, Pirro’s office initiated a separate probe into potential fraud for the $2.5 billion-and-counting project in addition to misrepresentations made by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, a persistent Trump nemesis, to Congress on the matter last year. (My backgrounder on the scandal here.)

In December 2025, Pirro twice emailed the Fed’s Board of Governors “in a collaborative manner,” according to her office, seeking records on the renovations. Pirro also offered to meet with Fed officials the first week of January to provide more details on the nascent investigation.

The Fed never responded. (Go ahead and try that at home, folks.) Left with few choices in the face of rebuffs by the so-called “independent” agency, Pirro pursued a completely appropriate legal process to compel the production of the necessary records.

No One is Above the Law. Just Kidding.

To that end, a grand jury returned two subpoenas, which were served on the Fed on Jan. 9.; Powell disclosed the existence of the subpoenas to the public in a squirrelly video statement a few days later.

Insisting the investigation represented retaliation for the Fed’s refusal to lower interest rates—something the president routinely condemns in strong, and sometimes personal, language aimed at the longtime Fed chairman—Powell nonetheless admitted that “no one, certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve, is above the law.”

That, however, does not appear to be the case. Not only did the Fed refuse to respond to Pirro’s entreaty for voluntary cooperation—despite his self-proclaimed fidelity to “accountability in our democracy”—it refused to comply with the deadlines listed on the subpoenas. (Again, try that at home and see how it works out.)

In making their defiant position official, a team of white shoe lawyers including former special counsel Robert Hur, who let Joe Biden off the hook for keeping classified documents, then sought to kill the subpoenas. “The purpose of the Subpoenas is to dictate the Federal Reserve’s setting of monetary policy—specifically, to harass, pressure, and punish the Federal Reserve and Chair Jerome Powell until they set monetary policy the President wants,” the Fed’s legal team wrote in a Feb. 3 motion to “quash” the subpoenas. “Thus [Pirro], through the abuse of the criminal process, seeks to help the President achieve indirectly what the law prohibits him from doing directly.”

Fortunately for Powell, the case ended up before D.C. Chief Judge Jeb Boasberg, another Trump nemesis who is still trying to force the Trump administration to return Tren de Aragua gang bangers deported to their home country of Venezuela last year. Last week, Boasberg issued an extraordinarily rare (aren’t they all in the Trump era?) order granting the Fed’s request to quash the subpoenas.

The Boas Strikes Again

The Obama appointee, per usual, punctuated his order with clickbait conjecture that had nothing to do with the substance of the pending investigation. “Being perceived as the President’s adversary has become risky in recent years,” Boasberg wrote on March 13. “In his second term, Trump has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute such people, and the Department’s prosecutors have listened.” (A particularly rich statement coming from the judge who signed an unknown number of nondisclosure orders on subpoenas sought by the Biden DOJ and Special Counsel Jack Smith for the cell phone activity of sitting Republican senators.)

While Boasberg spent 27 pages going back years to recount all the perceived threats the president made against Powell, the judge intentionally overlooked one very important part of the timeline: a proposed quid pro quo to make the investigation go away.

According to a filing by Pirro’s office, Powell’s personal attorney and an attorney representing the Fed made a “peculiar suggestion” to the government during a January 29 meeting about the subpoenas. “Chair Powell’s lawyer suggested to [Pirro] that Chair Powell would be likely to step down from the Board when his term as Chairman expires—but only if the Subpoenas were withdrawn and the Chair was no longer under investigation,” her office disclosed in February.

In other words: Pirro needs to drop the criminal investigation into his client or Powell will remain an influential and constant thorn in the side of the president until January 2028, when his full term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board expires. (His term as chairman expires in May.) “Ironically, it is the Board that has cynically attempted to inject politics into this matter by strongarming [Pirro].” (The Fed’s lawyer claimed her description of the meeting was “irrelevant” and “inaccurate.”)

Boasberg apparently was unmoved by such a mob-like, and potentially unlawful, suggestion to the top law enforcement officer in the nation’s capital. Did that suggestion rise to obstruction, or even bribery?

Further, it appears that Boasberg, who continues to pursue his bogus contempt case against the Trump administration, was unbothered by the Fed’s ignoring two grand jury subpoenas before he stepped in to make it official. Contempt, at least in Boasberg’s courtroom, is in the eye of the beholder.

Pirro responded with justified fury following Boasberg’s decision, calling him an “activist judge” and accusing him of “neutering” the grand jury’s ability to investigate crimes.

She said her office plans to appeal his decision. Watch here: