Donald Trump on Wednesday demanded former central bank chief Jerome Powell quit the body’s board, despite a watchdog finding no criminal misconduct in a costly Federal Reserve renovation project.
When he announced that the DOJ probe had been launched in January, Powell explicitly said it was meant to pressure the Fed to set interest rates in line with Trump’s preferences. The charges were dropped after a senator from Trump’s own party refused to confirm the president’s chosen successor to Powell, saying he would only do so if the criminal probe was stopped. Powell took the helm of the Fed during Trump’s first presidency in 2018 and was subsequently reappointed to the position under Democratic president Joe Biden.
“At no point during our evaluation did we find reasonable grounds to believe that a violation of federal criminal law had occurred,” the Office of the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve said in its report. At the time, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said she would bow to the inspector general’s findings. But on Wednesday, Trump demanded Powell be “forced to resign” from the Fed’s board over the issue and said he was directing his Attorney General to “study the report. “If he doesn’t resign, he should be sued, at the highest level,” said Trump. On Wednesday, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said the OIG’s report proved that Trump’s DOJ has “no basis to restart the President’s witch hunt against former Fed Chair Jerome Powell.”
