“Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powellsaid Sunday the Department of Justice has served the central bank with subpoenas and threatened it with a criminal indictment over his testimony this summer about the Fed’s building renovations.
The move represents an unprecedented escalation in President Donald Trump’s battle with the Fed, an independent agency he has repeatedly attacked for not cutting its key interest rate as quickly as Trump prefers. The subpoena relates to his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in June, Powell said, regarding the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation of two office buildings, a project that Trump criticized as excessive.
Powell on Sunday cast off what has up to this point been a restrained approach to Trump’s criticisms and personal insults, which he has mostly ignored. Instead, Powell issued a video statement in which he bluntly characterized the threat of criminal charges as simple “pretexts” to undermine the Fed’s independence when it comes to setting interest rates.
“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said.”
It is not normal for the justice department or the FBI to release the internal files of an investigation. Such files have lots of speculations and falsehoods in them, and releasing them can falsely destroy people’s reputations.
Over the 20th century, the U.S. developed norms that separated the justice system from the whims of the president. Trump is breaking that down and weakening the United States as a strong democracy.
“Federal law enforcement last year investigated Homan, who allegedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives seeking government contracts, according to an MSNBC report on Saturday. The outlet reported that Homan indicated he could help the undercover agents secure government contracts. The Justice Department waited to see if Homan planned to fulfil this claim, but the case stalled and was closed this summer.”
Does he still have the money?
… Homan is a close ally of the president, and served for a stint as the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first term. The border czar has been among the most visible defenders of the president’s second term immigration agenda, and has been a key player in executing the administration’s deportation policy.
“An archived version of the study is still available online, and states that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides” than the left”
“Navarro was indicted in June 2022 after the House held him in contempt of Congress. He was convicted by a jury a year later.
The Justice Department separately sued Navarro to recover emails he sent on private accounts but related to government business. The Justice Department similarly abandoned that effort after Trump took office earlier this year.”
Trump and Republicans for years lied and exaggerated about Democrats using the justice system against them. Now, in full honesty, Trump repeatedly uses the justice system against people who criticize him. U.S. democracy is on shaky grounds.
“President Donald Trump threatened to open an investigation targeting Chris Christie over the former New Jersey governor’s decade-old “Bridgegate” scandal after Christie criticized Trump on television earlier in the day.
The threat came just days after the FBI searched the home and office of another Trump critic, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as part of an open criminal investigation. Trump lashed out at the former friend-turned-foe Christie in an evening Aug. 24 post on Truth Social, remarking that he just watched “Sloppy Chris Christie” on ABC’s This Week.”
“When dealing with a potentially career-threatening political scandal, there is a standard playbook: Issue a broad denial. Attack the accuser. Then declare the controversy over and tell everyone to move on.
That’s what Emil Bove — Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer-turned-senior Justice Department official — is going for as he tries to secure a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. The scandal? A scathing whistleblower disclosure by a former Justice Department lawyer that alleges disturbing and unethical conduct on the part of Bove and other senior DOJ lawyers, including multiple efforts to defy the courts in service of Trump’s agenda.
The disclosure, released one day before Bove’s Senate confirmation hearing last week, has further complicated a nomination that had already opened an uncomfortable fissure within the conservative legal movement and which faces an uncertain future in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Immediately after the allegations were unveiled, a defense took shape among the Trump administration and its Republican allies.”
If fired for appropriately investigating the president or his allies, then this is a great degradation of the rule of law. The U.S. cannot call itself a strong democracy when administrations can punish people for proper legal investigations. Future prosecutors and investigators will have to think twice before investigating any potential crimes by Trump or his friends.
“At least three federal prosecutors who worked on cases against Jan. 6 rioters were fired Friday by the Justice Department, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials familiar with the dismissals.
A copy of one of the dismissal letters seen by NBC News was signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, notifying the recipient that they were “removed from federal service effective immediately.” No reason for the removal was stated in the letter.”…”The Trump administration in late January fired probationary federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and prosecutors who worked on former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump. The administration also demoted some career prosecutors who worked on the Capitol siege investigation.Probationary workers are either recent hires or have taken new positions.The firings on Friday, though, marked the first time that career prosecutors who had worked Jan. 6 cases and who were past their probationary period of federal employment had been fired.”
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. to appear in court on Friday, more than two months after being deported to a prison in El Salvador, the country of his birth. No matter how the trial shakes out, it’s just the latest example of the Trump administration playing fast and loose with both the facts and the law.”
…
“Xinis “order[ed] that [the administration] return Abrego Garcia to the United States.” The Supreme Court intervened, staying Xinis’ order but otherwise affirming its finding to “facilitate…the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7.”
But the administration refused, illogically claiming it had no right to do so. During an Oval Office meeting in April, both Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele mocked the idea of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said. In a legal filing that same day, DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzarra said the department “does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.”
“He is not coming back to our country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News. “President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story.”
So, the news on Friday that Abrego Garcia was coming back—and at the Department of Justice’s direction, no less—was a bit stunning.”
…
“even though the indictment could very well just be retroactive justification for deporting someone in violation of numerous court orders, it remains the case that a court of law is the ideal place to adjudicate allegations against Abrego Garcia—not unsourced allegations delivered in press conferences and on social media.”