Pirro’s losses in Fed investigation should stay on the books, judge rules

A federal judge in Washington denied on Thursday a prosecutor’s request to erase the record of the government’s legal losses its attempt to investigate former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Chief Judge James E. Boasberg in the D.C. Circuit’s scathing order, replete with media quotes and links to YouTube clips, denied a motion by the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to vacate his earlier rulings that had gone against Pirro.

The latest development caps a monthslong legal saga that saw Boasberg halt aspects of an investigation by Pirro into the Fed. Boasberg in March quashed a pair of subpoenas Pirro issued because, he ruled, Pirro’s effort was intended at least in part to “harass and pressure Powell” on behalf of the president, who wanted lower interest rates.

Pirro in April agreed to close the investigation of Powell under pressure from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Tillis dropped a Senate blockade of the confirmation of Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to replace Powell as leader of the Fed. Warsh was confirmed in May and will chair his first meeting of the Fed’s rate-setting committee next week.

Powell stepped down from the Fed chair as required by law but opted to retain his separate seat on the Fed’s board. He wanted to ensure that the legal threat to the Fed had truly ended, even after Pirro said she had dropped the investigation.

Boasberg in a scathing order Thursday appeared sympathetic to Powell’s perspective that the legal threat to the Fed may not truly have ended with Pirro’s decision to drop the investigation. Pirro said she could reopen the investigation if she chose.

“It sounds like you’re going to keep trying to find out more,” CNN host Jake Tapper said to Pirro in an interview. “Pirro essentially confirmed that interpretation,” Boasberg wrote.

Despite prosecutors’ attempts to confine the arguments to the courtroom, Boasberg drew on evidence of what Pirro and President Donald Trump had said in the press. Boasberg’s orders were simply “using the President’s explicit statements as evidence of what his deputies understood that he wanted,” he wrote.

Boasberg wrote that Pirro’s legal rationale in the wake of his decision had “vacillated,” first promising to appeal, and then switching to a “curious” strategy of asking him to vacate his earlier rulings now that the investigation was over. Boasberg’s latest order denied that motion to vacate.

Boasberg’s initial ruling had found that although a prosecutor ought generally to be allowed to issue grand jury subpoenas on minimal suspicion, evidence that those subpoenas might be part of a campaign of political harassment raised the bar for allowing an investigation to proceed. Pirro’s motion to vacate would undo that ruling.

“If the Government got its way here, then any party that lost a court case could choose to moot the matter, erase an unfavorable decision, and freeze the accumulation and refinement of precedents on which our legal system depends,” Boasberg wrote.

As judge of a lower-court, Boasberg’s decisions don’t necessarily create precedent, he noted. But his “reasoning still offers a public good from which other parties and judges may draw.”

The Fed declined to comment. A spokesman for Pirro didn’t immediate respond to questions about Boasberg’s order and whether she might still attempt to appeal.