Attorney General Todd Blanche said Friday the Justice Department will not reopen a criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell after a watchdog found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Washington Examiner reporting on Blanche’s Bloomberg interview laid out the decision in plain terms: prosecutors are not bringing back a criminal case tied to the Fed’s multibillion-dollar headquarters renovation.
Blanche left little room to read between the lines.
"We're not reopening a criminal investigation into him,"
he said Friday.
The statement followed release of an internal watchdog report. That report found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Powell, the former Federal Reserve chairman.
The Justice Department will not open a criminal investigation into him on that basis. Blanche’s comments also closed off, at least for now, any move by prosecutors to revive scrutiny of Powell over the Fed headquarters project.
The renovation itself was described as a multibillion-dollar effort. Beyond that price tag and the watchdog’s bottom-line finding, the public record in this account does not spell out further cost breakdowns, specific renovation allegations, or the watchdog office’s formal name.
Blanche spoke as attorney general. He framed the call as a decision not to reopen a criminal investigation, and as a refusal to launch one after the watchdog review.
Powell was the named subject of that investigative context. No quote from Powell appears in the available account. No venue for the Blanche interview was given beyond the Bloomberg sit-down on Friday.
What was clear was the Justice Department’s posture: no reopened criminal case, and no fresh criminal opening, after a report that did not find criminal wrongdoing connected to the headquarters renovation matter.
Federal criminal probes are supposed to rise or fall on evidence, not on political heat around a powerful institution’s spending. When a watchdog finds no criminal case and the attorney general says the door stays shut, that is how a system ordered by facts is supposed to work, even when the agency under the microscope is the Federal Reserve.
