The Department of Justice doesn’t plan to reopen its criminal probe into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell regarding a multi-billion-dollar renovation of one of the Fed’s complexes, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed Monday.
The spokesperson declined to comment further.
Attorney General Todd Blanche first told Bloomberg Friday that the DOJ wouldn’t reopen its investigation into Powell but said, “there's a big difference between whether he did anything wrong and whether he should be held accountable and whether there's any criminal conduct.”
The Office of the Inspector General last week said it found mismanagement, but neither criminality nor administrative misconduct in its investigation into the Fed’s over-budget renovations of its Marriner S. Eccles Building and the adjacent 1951 Constitution Avenue Building.
Blanche Friday said he believes the OIG report “speaks for itself about what the board did and did not do, and I think that we should focus on that sort of accountability.”
The DOJ opened the investigation in January but dropped it in April after a federal judge said that there was "abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.”
Blanche said there’s “more work to do to understand” how the project got to be so expensive, and that “we'll see what happens.”
“It's pretty clear he did not act appropriately as far as oversight, and that's what the inspector general concluded … [but] not having any sort of oversight over the folks doing billion-dollar projects isn't necessarily a crime,” he told Bloomberg TV.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Blanche would “study” the OIG report. In a Truth Social post responding to the report, Trump demanded the former Fed chair be forced to resign “IMMEDIATELY!”
“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 wrote.
The Fed plans to have an independent auditor verify the accuracy and compliance of all renovation project awards to date, and it will set “clear internal controls and standards for budgeting, performance, and oversight for the future, so that no issues of this kind will be repeated,” Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said in a September letter attached to the OIG report.
