During a brief Q&A with reporters on Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump was asked whether he agreed with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop the widely ridiculed criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The president immediately challenged the premise of the question.
“It’s not dropped,” he replied.
Yes, it is.
To be sure, the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., didn’t want to drop the case. Two weeks ago, two prosecutors from Pirro’s office showed up without invitation or advance notice at Federal Reserve headquarters seeking a tour of the construction site. A week later, the former Fox News host said she would forge ahead with a case against Powell.
Pirro was, however, quickly overwhelmed by reality. The politically motivated investigation obviously had no merit; a federal judge had already quashed the DOJ’s subpoenas, emphasizing the inconvenient fact that prosecutors “produced essentially zero evidence”; and the longer the baseless case continued, the more it threatened to delay confirmation of Trump’s new Fed chair nominee.
Short on options, Pirro threw in the towel on Friday, and Kevin Warsh’s odds of confirmation approached 100% soon after. The Federal Reserve’s inspector general’s office will scrutinize the process surrounding construction of the institution’s new building, but the criminal probe has run its course (at least for the foreseeable future).
That’s not to say that the three-month fiasco was unimportant. The failed investigation offered fresh evidence of the value of fighting back against White House abuses, of the lasting damage the administration has done to the Fed’s independence, and of how far the Justice Department is willing to go, as part of an indefensible campaign of retaliation, in launching baseless probes into those who stand in the president’s way.
As the dust settles on the Powell debacle, it’s worth sparing a thought for the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital.
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.
After the president fired Pam Bondi earlier this month, it sparked speculation as to whom Trump might choose as the next attorney general, and there was a round of chatter about whether Pirro would among the top contenders.
The odd thing is, it’s far from clear whether her repeated failures make her any less appealing to the White House — or more. On the one hand, Trump rejects those seen as “losers”; on the other, the hapless U.S. attorney keeps going after his perceived foes, indifferent to merit or propriety, which is exactly the kind of quality the president seems to be looking for at Main Justice.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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