Mar. 18, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

The most important part of Chief Judge James Boasberg’s ruling quashing Justice Department subpoenas served on the Federal Reserve was not simply that he blocked them.

It was that he refused to suspend common sense. He read the subpoenas against the public record that produced them. He took President Donald Trump at his word. That is what made the opinion so important.

Judge Boasberg did not begin with dry procedural throat-clearing. He began with Trump’s own attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the broader campaign of presidential and White House pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.

He quoted Trump calling Powell “TOO ANGRY, TOO STUPID, & TOO POLITICAL, to have the job of Fed Chair.” He cited another post calling Powell “one of the dumbest, and most destructive, people in Government.” He noted Trump’s statement that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” and his threat that if the Fed did not cut rates, “I may have to force something.”

That was not decoration; it was the architecture of the opinion. From page one, Judge Boasberg made clear that motive was not some side issue here. Motive was the case. The subpoenas arose from a Justice Department investigation into supposed cost overruns in the Federal Reserve’s multiyear headquarters renovation project and into Powell’s congressional testimony touching on those renovations. On paper, that was the inquiry. In reality, Judge Boasberg concluded, something else was going on.

Judge Boasberg wrote that there was “abundant evidence” that the dominant, if not sole, purpose of the subpoenas was to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the president or resign and make way for someone who would. On the other side of the scale, he said the government had offered “no evidence whatsoever” that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president. By the end of the opinion, that judgment hardened even further: The government had produced “essentially zero evidence” of criminality, and its stated justifications looked like “a convenient pretext” for another unstated purpose.

That is an extraordinary thing for a federal judge to say about the Department of Justice.

This was not a close call. It was not a case in which prosecutors pushed the envelope and got reined back in. It was a finding that criminal process had been used as pressure rather than law enforcement.

And the way Judge Boasberg got there was the real story. He did not invent improper purpose. Rather, he looked at what was already in plain view. Trump spent months attacking Powell, demanding lower rates and making his desired outcome unmistakable. He said, “Anybody that disagrees with me will never be the Fed Chairman!” He said, “I want to get him out.” He said he would “love to fire his ass.” He said Powell “should resign.”

A political appointee then floated the Fed renovation issue as a path toward investigation and possible removal. After that, the U.S. Attorney’s Office opened a criminal investigation on that very theory and served subpoenas on the Federal Reserve.

Judge Boasberg looked at that sequence and refused to act naive.

He was right to.

For too long, courts have often maintained an artificial separation between presidential rhetoric and executive action. The president says what he says. Prosecutors do what they do. Judges examine the narrower legal record and resist attributing too much significance to the political atmosphere outside the courthouse. But there comes a point where that posture stops looking disciplined and starts looking unserious.

When a president has repeatedly identified the official he wants pressured or removed, made his desired outcome unmistakable and then his Justice Department shows up with a paper-thin theory aimed at that same target, a court does not have to pretend those events are unrelated. Judge Boasberg’s opinion suggested that at least some courts may be losing patience with that formalism.

What made the opinion important was not just that Judge Boasberg drew that inference here. It was that he did so openly, in a way that may signal a broader judicial willingness to read executive motive more realistically in politically saturated cases.

That is not judicial activism. It is common sense.

And Trump’s response since the ruling only reinforced the point. In a post after the decision, Trump attacked Judge Boasberg personally, called him a “Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge,” said he has been “‘after’ my people, and me, for years,” claimed the ruling had “little to do with the Law, and everything to do with Politics,” and said Judge Boasberg should be removed from cases involving Trump and his administration.

That mattered because it underscored the precise interpretive move Judge Boasberg made in the opinion. The judge treated Trump’s public words not as background noise, but as evidence reasonably bearing on motive and pretext. Trump’s reaction did not undercut that reasoning. It strengthened it.

It also said something larger and more troubling about the DOJ.

The government was given the chance to substantiate its claims and chose not to. Judge Boasberg was left, as he put it, with “no credible reason” to think prosecutors were investigating suspicious facts as opposed to targeting a disfavored official.

That is not just a loss.  It is a collapse of confidence.

And it matters all the more because of what a subpoena is. A subpoena is the point where political pressure becomes legal compulsion. It is the government bringing the authority of criminal process into the room.

That is why misuse of subpoena power is so dangerous. It can impose burden, stigma, cost and fear long before any indictment, and it can intimidate even when no charges are ever filed. Judge Boasberg understood that. He did not treat these subpoenas as some technical skirmish over records. He treated them as part of an effort to pressure the chair of an independent central bank and, in his words, to “bulldoz[e] the Fed’s statutory independence.”

That is why this ruling matters beyond Powell and beyond the Federal Reserve.

Judge Boasberg did not just quash subpoenas.

He modeled a more realistic way for courts to evaluate politically freighted exercises of state power.

And if more judges start doing the same, this opinion will be remembered as more than a rebuke in one ugly case. It will be remembered as an early sign that courts were no longer willing to separate presidential coercion from the legal machinery deployed to carry it out.

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.

Mar. 18, 2026, 3:31 PM EDT

MS NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle set the facts straight on Tuesday’s “The 11th Hour,” after Donald Trump’s National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett tried to downplay the effect the Iran war is having on American consumers.

During an interview with CNBCHassett said the U.S. economy was “fundamentally sound” and that if the war continued, it “wouldn’t really disrupt the U.S. economy very much at all.” While he acknowledged that a prolonged conflict would “hurt consumers,” he said that was “the last of our concerns right now.”

“We are now in the third week of the war,” Ruhle said after playing a clip of the Trump official’s comments. “Kevin Hassett says the war would not disrupt the economy very much at all. But for facts’ sake, it already has.”

“Everybody from Wall Street to Main Street is trying to navigate the growing economic risks created by the war with Iran,” she said, noting that while markets finished strong on Tuesday, the price of oil was still climbing.

“If you have been watching this show, then you already know what it means for your wallet. Higher oil prices translate to higher prices for gas, diesel and even jet fuel, all the things that keep our economy — not just our economy, but the global economy — humming along,” she explained.

If Trump officials want to understand the reality many Americans are facing, the MS NOW host advised them simply to “walk outside.”

“Look at gas prices,” she said. “We have had farmer after farmer on this network warning what increased diesel prices do for their tractors, what increased fertilizer prices do. And not to mention, there’s loads of businesses that have nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz, but they’re in this moment where they’re like, ‘I’m not hiring, I’m not growing. We’re at war. I don’t know what’s ahead.’”

While Ruhle assured viewers that the U.S. economy is “resilient,” she said the war comes as many Americans are already struggling with inflation due to Trump’s tariffs. “When you have this kind of stress, even strong economies can start to buckle,” she warned.

You can watch Ruhle’s full analysis in the clip at the top of the page.

Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”