The Dictatorship
How Trump’s pursuit of Powell is warping prosecutorial power
Two things can be true at once: Many American presidents have wanted a more compliant Federal Reserve. And President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Fed Chair Jerome Powell has taken tactics to a disturbing level — further eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence.
The issue is no longer simply Powell, or Trump’s preferences on interest rates or even Fed independence in the abstract. What became unmistakable this week was that a criminal investigation of Powell has been used as a political weapon, abusing prosecutorial powers.
Simply put, prosecutors were never meant to be part of a president’s plan to break the Fed.
Prosecutors were never meant to be part of a president’s plan to break the Fed.
Powell’s term as Fed chair ends on May 15. But he holds a separate tenure on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors that runs through Jan. 31, 2028. So he could remain at the central bank after a successor takes over. In an interview broadcast Wednesday, Trump said, “I’ll have to fire him” if Powell does not step aside from the board when his term ends. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors arrived at a Fed building renovation site without warning.
Those seemingly disparate facts form an ominous truth about how the administration has attempted to force out an independent Fed chair.
The world — and global markets — were shocked to learn in January that the DOJ had opened a criminal investigation into Powell purportedly over renovations of historic Fed buildings in Washington. White House officials have alleged that Powell made false statements to Congress over the $2.5 billion project’s costs or failed to comply with permitting regulations.
In a video statement in January, Powell was unusually blunt, saying, “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.”
The Wall Street Journal’s analysis of Powell’s decision to disclose the investigation noted, “The threat of the prosecution of a sitting Fed chair would be material information for investors or anyone else trying to understand the forces shaping interest-rate deliberations.”
Renovations can run over cost, of course, and large public projects can be mismanaged. Prosecutors are entitled to investigate credible evidence of fraud, corruption or intentional deception. But that is precisely the difficulty here: The public record suggests the legal basis for this investigation is weak.
In March, a federal judge quashed subpoenas directed at Powell with unusually terse language. A “mountain of evidence” suggested “the Government served these subpoenas on the [Federal Reserve] Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning,” Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote.
Prosecutors “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime,” he added, calling the case “so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual.”
The court did not merely reject the subpoenas on a technical ground. It identified the broader political campaign against Powell as part of the legal problem.
Trump’s criticism of Powell over interest rates dates back to his first term. But this is not merely pressure over monetary policy. While Trump was publicly threatening Powell’s future at the Fed, prosecutors’ unannounced arrival at the Fed construction site suggested prosecutorial pressure will remain part of the campaign until the dispute is resolved on terms the president prefers.
A criminal investigation is supposed to determine whether a crime occurred. It is not supposed to become a cloud kept in place because the cloud itself is useful.
And the criminal investigation is hanging over more than Powell. Trump has named Kevin Warsh as his choice for the next Fed chair. But Powell has said he intends to remain on the Fed board until the investigation is over, and Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, has said he will not vote to confirm Warsh until the DOJ’s probe of Powell is closed. The unresolved criminal probe has become entangled with the leadership transition.
Prosecutors wield extraordinary authority. That authority is justified by the expectation that it will be used for law-enforcement purposes, not as a political instrument against independent actors the president wants removed. This situation has all the problems that accompany selective prosecution as well as the more subtle but equally corrosive use of unresolved criminal process to wear down resistance, damage credibility and make institutional independence more difficult to sustain.
That is why this story is bigger than Powell. The danger is not just what happens to one Fed chair. It is the precedent set when a criminal investigation can be kept alive because the pressure it creates is politically useful. Once that line is crossed, other officials and institutions with legal independence become vulnerable to the same tactic. And the boundary between prosecution and politics becomes less real, less enforceable and easier to cross the next time.
The administration has also gone to the Supreme Court to remove another Fed governor, Lisa Cook, before her Senate-confirmed term runs out. The high court has allowed Cook to keep her seat while the justices consider how much power a president has to force out Fed officials. That underscores that this is not just a feud over interest rates but part of a larger effort to break down the legal protections that keep the Fed independent.
Past presidents have attacked the Fed, and public institutions are not above scrutiny. But the criminal process cannot become a tool for forcing institutional submission or the mechanism by which independence is made untenable. And one that does so where the strategic value of the investigation appears to exceed its legal merit further corrodes the DOJ’s independence and our broader national commitment to the rule of law.
The threat to fire Powell is serious enough on its own. The deeper problem is a government willing to use the pressure of criminal process to make that threat stick.
Duncan Levin is a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who serves as a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and is a frequent contributor to MS NOW.
A dozen state attorneys general sued Monday to block Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, citing the harm the megamerger could pose to competition in Hollywood.
The deal would consolidate two powerhouse movie studios, several popular streaming services and the national news networks CBS and BLN into a single company under the purview of the billionaire Trump-aligned Ellison family.
That consolidation, greenlit by the Justice Department’s antitrust division last month, would negatively reshape the production landscape in Hollywood by depriving studios of the blockbuster series they rely on to generate revenue, the state law enforcement officials maintain.
The concerns in the lawsuit echo the “unequivocal opposition” to the merger voiced by thousands of industry professionals in an open letter in April.
In the lawsuit, the states argue the merger would “extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide,” and that it “combines two
of the nation’s five major film distributors, leaving only four to control over 85 percent of all wide-release theatrical films in the United States.”
The state-led challenge poses the most significant legal barrier in the country to that new media landscape becoming reality. The United Kingdom’s antitrust regulator is also considering action.
Consolidation in markets “leads to increased unaffordability, a loss of good paying job opportunities and fewer choices for consumers. It gives too few too much power,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press conference shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “Antitrust enforcement is democracy’s check on oligarchy.”
Paramount said the lawsuit “distorts settled antitrust law and is based on misrepresentation of competition in the entertainment industry today.”
The media giant characterized the merger as a means to create a “stronger competitor against dominant streaming and technology platforms who have harmed the market for theatrical exhibition and jobs in the entertainment industry.”
Movie producer David Ellison’s Skydance Media bought Paramount last year after receiving financial backing from his father Larry Ellison, the billionaire Oracle co-founder and personal friend of President Donald Trump. He then launched a bidding war with Netflix for Warner Bros., which had been put up for auction last year as part of a strategy to manage its $35 billion debt load.
The Ellisons ultimately prevailed over Netflix in February after Warner’s board announced that Paramount Skydance’s offer, which involved $40 billion worth of personal financing from the elder Ellison, was superior to an agreement it had previously struck with Netflix.
The Trump administration’s swift approval of the merger reignited speculation over his personal relationship with Larry Ellison. The deal would put the Ellison family in control of BLN, a news organization the president frequently decries without evidence as “fake news.”
Trump publicly involved himself in the competing Warner Bros. bids last year, saying that it was “imperative” BLN be sold and that its current ownership should not be in charge of the company. The president has since downplayed his personal role in the mergerbut concerns about what the deal could mean for the future of BLN still loom large.
The Trump administration approved the Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount Globalthe parent company of CBS News, last year after the network agreed to shell out $16 millionto settle a lawsuit Trump brought over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. Trump sought $20 billion in damages over claims that the Harris interview, which aired during the 2024 presidential race, had been deceptively edited, a legal claim that experts said almost certainly would have failed.
With Ellison at the helm, Paramount Skydance also acquired Bari Weiss’ media company, The Free Press, and installed Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News. Weiss’ control over programming has since raised questions of objectivity and spurred an exodus of many of the network’s most prominent career journalists.
Erum Salam contributed to this report.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter covering national politics and policy for MS NOW. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at SydneyCarruth.46 or follow her work on X and Bluesky.
The Dictatorship
Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
By now, Donald Trump has probably grown accustomed to legal setbacks in court, though his case against the IRS has started to backfire in ways the president didn’t see coming. The Associated Press reported:
A federal judge said Monday that President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose” as she referred attorneys for disciplinary actions.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams amounts to a stinging rebuke of the Republican president’s lawsuit, characterizing it as an exercise in self-dealing in which he sued an entity that is effectively under his control.
The basic details of Trump’s IRS lawsuit are likely familiar: During his first term, a contractor leaked his tax returns, and six years later, the president has filed suit against the tax agency, saying he’s entitled to $10 billion in taxpayer funds.
In May, he voluntarily withdrew his own litigationand soon afterward, the administration unveiled his reward for having done so: a compensation fund worth $1.766 billionwhich was quickly condemned by members of both parties as a “slush fund” that would be used to benefit the White House’s political allies.
That bipartisan pushback appears to have forced the president to back off his plans for the fund. And at that point, the case appeared to have run its course: Trump filed a rather preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration; he then abandoned that case before it could be fully adjudicated; and that was that.
Except, it wasn’t quite that simple, and one of the underlying legal problems persisted: The federal judge in the case, responding to a request filed by 35 former federal judges calling on her to reopen the case, raised serious concerns in late May, ordering Trump and his lawyers to address allegations that he committed fraud on the court.
In a four-page orderWilliams said she intended to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve the dubious case was “premised on deception.” (This same judge, as recently as late April, expressed skepticism about the propriety of the casesince it appeared the president was, for all intents and purposes, both the plaintiff and the defendant.)
More than a month later, she apparently did not like what she discoveredconcluding that Trump and his lawyers acted “in bad faith” and filed a civil suit “for an improper purpose.”
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” Williams wrote.
The judge also prohibited the parties from even referring to it as a “settlement.”
Just as notably, as CNBC reportedWilliams “referred Trump’s lawyer in the lawsuit, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for consideration on whether Brito should be disciplined in light of the findings in the new order.” The judge also “ordered that a copy of her ruling be mailed to the State Bar of New York, of which Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is a member, as well as to the District of Columbia Bar, of which Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward is a member.”
The developments come just two days before Blanche, Trump’s choice to serve as attorney general, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing.
A spokesperson for the Republican’s legal team said in a written statement, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
The statement made no effort to address allegations of professional misconduct or the fact that Trump’s lawyers just received a brutal smackdown in court.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, as his temporary replacement in the Senate on Monday, two days after the lawmaker’s sudden passing.
With Darline Graham alongside him, McMaster said she “agreed to serve through tears” in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Graham is nine years her brother’s junior and has never held public office. Her parents died before she reached the age of 14, and her brother later became her legal guardian. She is the Commissioner of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, where she has worked for nearly seven years; serves on the state’s Workforce Development Board; and is the president-elect of the National Council of State Agencies for the Blind.
“Lindsey has always been there for me, and now, I will be there for him,” Graham said in her first public remarks after the senator’s death, calling it a “privilege” to temporarily fill his seat.
President Donald Trump wrote on social media earlier Monday that he recommended the Republican governor appoint Graham to serve the remainder of his term, which expires in January.
“This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!” Trump wrote.
Tim Scott, South Carolina’s senior senator, appeared to agreesaying that she would be “a fantastic pick” to serve out the remainder of the senate term.
“After speaking with Darline, there is no one better who understands Lindsey’s love for family, our state, and our country,” Scott wrote in an X post Monday morning.
Appointing the senator’s sister as a neutral placeholder avoids the appearance of favoritism in the special primary later this summer to decide the new Republican nominee for the seat he held for more than two decades.
Trump, who said he spoke with Graham just hours before his death, called him “one of the greatest people and Senators” he has ever known and “a true American Patriot.”
Graham was elected in 2002 and was seeking a fifth term in November. A special primary election will be held Aug. 11 to decide the new Republican nominee, who will likely go on to succeed him in the reliably red state.
Erum Salam reported from New York.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Nnamdi Egwuonwu is a reporter for MS NOW.
- How best to honor Lindsey Graham’s legacy? Republicans are divided.
- Coalition of states sue to stop Paramount-Warner megamerger
- Judge slams Trump-IRS ‘settlement,’ refers attorneys for possible disciplinary actions
- Trump and Tim Scott back Lindsey Graham’s sister as his temporary replacement
- Lindsey Graham: Maddening, gracious, and an ally I was glad to have
- Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.13.26: Plan to replace Platner in Maine takes shape
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