Trump BEGS DOJ to SAVE HIM as Judge FORCES HIM TO PAYBACK!!

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Well, developing within the last few hours a federal judge blocking the Justice Department subpoenas in their investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Those subpoenas targeted Powell's congressional testimony that he had made on the headquarters renovations for the Federal Reserve. Powell claims the investigation is punishment for his refusal to cut interest rates despite pressure from President Trump. The judge in the case found quote a mountain of evidence uh retaliation and quote zero evidence of a crime. DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro vows to appeal. Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity preventing my office from investigating the Federal Reserve.

[00:00:45]This is wrong and it is without legal authority.

[00:00:51]In general, the ruling protects the Fed's independence for now, but Pirro's appeal could reignite the fight over interest rates.

[00:00:58]>> Hey everyone, welcome back. Dr. John is here. So, what just happened, guys? A federal judge ruled that the DOJ's investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was conducted in bad faith, meaning the legal machinery was weaponized as a political tool, not genuine law enforcement. The administration's response wasn't to back down, but to rush to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. The judge ordered the case dismissed, a termination that shields Powell from being dragged through the same muddy terrain on the same discredited basis ever again. We are following breaking news. A federal judge has blocked subpoenas sent to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell by the Justice Department. Those subpoenas were issued back in January over Powell's testimony about renovations to office buildings. Tracking it all, NBC News Legal Affairs Reporter Gary Grumbach back with us from Washington, D.C. Gary, remind us about this case, but also walk us through what the judge said, because the remarks were pretty scathing.

[00:02:00]Yeah, you'll remember we actually didn't know about this until Jerome Powell came out with a video, a very rare video statement saying that he was served and his Federal Reserve Bank was served with a number of subpoenas related to the reconstruction of some of the Federal Reserve and what their actions were and how much money and how long it was taking to do all that. He came out with a video statement saying this was completely wrong and it was an attack on his independence and on the Fed's independence.

[00:02:24]Uh with this is now a federal judge here in Washington, Judge James Boasberg.

[00:02:28]>> The ruling constructs a legal precedent, one that the administration evidently finds so existentially threatening that it directed loyalist prosecutors to file an emergency petition with the highest court in the land seeking to either declare some form of immunity for the conduct in question or to simply overturn the finding and make it disappear from the legal record. The directive flowed from the president himself, according to reporting from the period, channeled through a trusted loyalist installed in a key prosecutorial position. that the subpoenas cannot stand. Now, I want to read a portion of what he says here, quote, "A mountain of evidence suggests that the government served these subpoenas on the board to pressure its chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning." And he says, "This will not stand." He says, "On the other side of the scales, the government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime." Now, the US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who brought these subpoenas, is saying that this is wrong. It's without precedents precedents. She's saying, "Jerome Powell is quote bathed in immunity and that he can now not be charged with a crime related to this situation." Of course, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia can certainly bring a charge against Powell in another situation. He's not completely immune from anything, but this is a major new >> a maneuver consistent with the broader pattern we have been meticulously mapping across this entire series. The emergency Supreme Court filing, launched under immense time pressure as a direct response to the bad faith ruling, arrives in the same dense political week that already contains the Pope attack, the ballroom backlash, the exposure of the hexagon cost deception, the viral Rubio moment, and the Rand Paul legislative revolt.

[00:04:14]>> Uh, but it's certainly moving the markets as we speak here. Absolutely, Gary. We're also hearing from Jeanine Pirro, as you mentioned, US attorney for DC calling this an activist judge. But we've heard from others as well. North Carolina Republican Senator Tom Tillis just weighing in. He, notably, is blocking President Trump's nominee to replace Powell over this investigation.

[00:04:34]What did he say?

[00:04:35]So, I I'm going to be honest with you, Hillary. I've not seen his statement, uh, but he was somebody who is is very against the idea of these investigations. He, of course, is not running for re-election, which allows him to be much more open. And here we go, the statement is right on the screen for you here. He says, "This ruling confirms just how weak and frivolous the criminal investigation of Chairman Powell is and is nothing more than a failed attack on Fed independence." He says, "We all know how this is going to end, and the GCU's attorneys' office should save itself from further embarrassment." As I was saying, Tillis is not running for re-election. He feels certainly more open and willing to say these kinds of things.

[00:05:10]>> one more slab of accumulating weight pressing down on a political structure that groans louder with each passing day. Before the legal ruling can make complete sense, you must understand the specific context of Jerome Powell and his fractious relationship with the administration that originally placed him in his position. Powell occupies the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, the independent central bank that holds the levers of American monetary policy in its constitutionally insulated hands. He was originally elevated to prominence by the president during the first term, a selection that later became a source of seething regret as the Fed chair refused to bend monetary policy to the political convenience of the White House. During the first term, the president's frustration with interest rate decisions that he viewed as insufficiently accommodating to his economic agenda boiled over repeatedly into public invective, but Powell remained in place protected by the structural independence that the Federal Reserve system was specifically designed to provide. In the second term, the relationship curdled further moving past mere frustration into something darker and more institutionally dangerous. Powell has consistently resisted intense pressure to slash interest rates maintaining a cautious monetary posture grounded in the Fed's analytical read of inflation risk. In the specific economic landscape of the period, that inflation risk is dominated by the oil price shock triggered by the military strikes against Iran a cascading economic consequence of a decision the president himself authorized. The president staring down the barrel of a midterm election and desperate for the economic sugar rush that lower rates would provide through cheaper mortgages, juiced business investment, and a soaring stock market has been publicly and privately livid at Powell's refusal to comply. The DOJ investigation that the federal judge just ruled was conducted in bad faith was by every available indication a component of the administration's broader effort to apply legal pressure to the Fed chair to create a cloud of legal jeopardy as a mechanism for influencing his monetary policy decisions or to construct the pretextual scaffolding for his eventual removal. The bad faith finding is therefore not merely a ruling about prosecutorial conduct in a discrete investigation. It is a judicial determination that the administration was using the machinery of law enforcement as a tool of economic policy pressure against an institution whose independence is a foundational pillar of the modern financial order. The bad faith standard in legal proceedings carries a specific and demanding meaning that is worth pausing to fully absorb because it illuminates exactly how damning this ruling truly is. For a judge to conclude that a government investigation was conducted in bad faith, the judge must find something far more severe than that the investigation yielded a disappointing outcome or ultimately failed to secure a conviction. The judge must find that the government was not genuinely acting in pursuit of a legitimate law enforcement objective. That the investigation was a pretextual shell concealing some other purpose. That the stated legal rationale offered to the court was not the actual rationale driving the conduct and that the prosecutorial power was being harnessed for an end other than the neutral enforcement of the law. This is a towering evidentiary bar. Judges are institutionally reluctant to make bad faith findings against the government because the entire legal system operates on a presumption that federal law enforcement acts with integrity and genuine purpose. When a judge overcomes that deeply embedded presumption and issues an explicit bad faith finding, it is because the evidence of improper prosecutorial motive was specific, documented, and incapable of being explained away by any innocent alternative narrative. The bad faith ruling against the DOJ's pursuit of Powell is therefore not a borderline judgment call or a close discretionary decision. It is a finding that the evidence of improper purpose was sufficiently clear and sufficiently weighty to overwhelm the strong institutional presumption of government good faith. And that finding, precise in its legal meaning, heavy in its institutional implications, requiring a specific evidentiary demonstration, is what the administration is now desperately attempting to convince the Supreme Court to nullify on an emergency basis. A reaction that itself prompts an uncomfortable question. If the DOJ's conduct was genuinely in good faith, why does it require an emergency Supreme Court intervention to protect it from the consequences of a ruling that examined that conduct and found it wanting? Let us drill into the Federal Reserve independence dimension because it constitutes the most constitutionally and institutionally significant element of this entire unfolding story. The Federal Reserve's insulation from direct political control is not a quaint bureaucratic custom or a polite convention that can be discarded when it becomes inconvenient. It is a specifically engineered structural feature of American monetary policy deliberately constructed to shield interest rate and money supply decisions from the short-term political pressures that electoral cycles generate. The reason for that deliberate insulation is brutally straightforward. Politicians, including presidents of every party and temperament, possess an inherent political interest in loose monetary policy that stimulates the economy in the near term even when that near term stimulation plants the seeds of longer-term inflationary disaster. The Fed's independence is the mechanism by which monetary policy can be calibrated to the long-term health of the economy rather than to the election calendar and the immediate gratification of voters.

[00:10:47]Every modern American president has chafed against the Fed's independence at various points. The current president has simply been more vocal, more persistent, and more willing to escalate than most of his predecessors. But, the traditional response to disagreement with Fed policy has always been to express frustration through public channels and to make appointments to the Fed board that reflect your economic philosophy. Using the Department of Justice to investigate the Fed chair as a mechanism of applying pressure is a categorical departure from the norms that have governed this relationship for generations. It is the institutional equivalent of what the bad faith ruling described, using a tool engineered for legitimate law enforcement purposes to pursue a political and economic objective that the law does not authorize. And the chilling effect on Federal Reserve independence that would ripple through the financial system if Fed chairs came to believe that opposing the president's rate preferences could result in DOJ investigations is exactly the nightmare scenario that the independent structure was designed to prevent. Consider the role of the loyalist prosecutor through whom this emergency appeal was channeled because her involvement is itself politically significant in dimensions that extend beyond the boundaries of this specific case. She was installed in one of the most powerful prosecutorial positions in the country during the second term, a placement consistent with the administration's broader strategy of embedding loyalists in key institutional nodes as a mechanism for bending those institutions toward the service of political objectives. She is specifically the person who was directed to file the emergency Supreme Court petition, and her involvement in both the underlying investigation and the desperate appeal is consistent with the pattern we have been documenting throughout this series. The systematic deployment of trusted operatives to wield institutional power in ways that serve the president's personal and political interests. The bad faith finding is, among other things, a judicial ruling about how the specific investigative and prosecutorial decisions made under the current DOJ leadership were formulated and for what ultimate purposes. The fact that her motion to the chief judge apparently seeking to limit the scope of the ruling or have it reconsidered was rejected indicates that the judicial system is not providing the relief the administration sought through institutional back channels. Hence, the emergency Supreme Court petition, which represents the administration's final institutional recourse when the lower court system has consistently failed to produce the desired outcome. But emergency Supreme Court petitions filed in cases where a lower court has found bad faith in government conduct are not typically greeted with open arms by the justices. The Supreme Court does not generally employ its emergency jurisdiction to shield government investigators who have been judicially determined to have acted in bad faith.

[00:13:41]The filing of such a petition under acute time pressure in a politically superheated context directed by a president against a ruling that exposes the internal conduct of his own Justice Department broadcast a signal that the administration is running out of institutional escape routes. Let me tether the Powell situation to the broader economic environment because the rate decision dispute derives its specific political potency from the particular economic conditions of the moment. The military strikes against Iran generated an oil price shock that has been the primary engine driving gas prices to levels that inflict tangible pain on households across the country.

[00:14:17]That oil price shock has inflationary implications that extend far beyond the pump seeping into everything that depends on energy costs, which in a modern economy is virtually everything.

[00:14:28]Powell and the Federal Reserve surveying that inflationary landscape with the analytical tools their institution provides have maintained a cautious posture on rate cuts, holding rates higher than the president demands because the inflation data does not support loosening. The president wants the cuts because lower interest rates would stimulate economic activity in ways that would improve the political environment ahead of the midterm elections. Cheaper mortgages, expanded business investment, a stock market rally. Powell's refusal to cut based on his reading of the inflation data that the president's own Iran policy helped generate is the economic policy equivalent of the military advisor who tells the commander in chief that his battle plan contains serious flaws. The president does not wish to hear the assessment, but the assessment is professionally grounded and institutionally appropriate. Using the Department of Justice to investigate the person delivering that unwelcome assessment in what a federal judge has now found was a bad faith investigation.

[00:15:27]Is the legal system being weaponized against economic independence in ways that produce consequences extending far beyond this single case? There is also the matter of the remarkable financial irony embedded in this situation. An irony reported in the preceding autumn that reveals something profound about the transactional framework through which this administration understands its relationship with the legal system.

[00:15:51]The president, through his Justice Department, had been pursuing financial damages from the government connected to what he characterized as bad faith prosecutions directed at him during the prior administration. The argument was straightforward and audacious. If prosecutors acted in bad faith in investigating him, he should be compensated for the costs and damages that flowed from those allegedly improper investigations. He sought a figure exceeding $230 million. Now, a federal judge has found that his own Department of Justice conducted a bad faith investigation. The inversion is almost impossibly perfect. An administration that championed the principle that bad faith government investigations create legal liability and should be aggressively challenged and remedied through the court system has now had its own prosecutorial conduct adjudicated under that very standard. The emergency Supreme Court appeal is, among other things, a frantic attempt to escape the legal precedent that the administration itself was vociferously arguing for when the shoe was on the other foot. An administration that demanded remedies for bad faith prosecution now desperately seeking to block the application of that remedy to its own behavior is pedaling a species of legal hypocrisy that is extraordinarily difficult to explain away in any forum, including the marbled chambers of the Supreme Court. The economic stakes dimension connects this story directly to the lived experience of ordinary Americans and therefore to the midterm political landscape. The Federal Reserve's rate decisions, which sit at the absolute center of the Powell dispute, have immediate and tangible consequences for households across the country. Mortgage rates, the cost of financing an automobile, credit card interest payments, the expense of borrowing to run a small business, all of these are directly influenced by the Fed's policy rate. If Powell cuts rates, those costs decline and the economy receives a jolt of stimulus. If he holds rate steady or raises them, those costs remain elevated or climb higher, acting as a persistent drag on household budgets. The president wants the cuts because lower rates generate the kind of near-term economic activity that produces favorable political optics in an election season. Powell is not cutting because the inflationary picture, driven in significant part by the oil shock from the Iran strikes, makes cutting irresponsible for an institution whose mandate is price stability. The administration is ensnared in a causal loop entirely of its own construction. The Iran conflict created the oil shock. The oil shock created the inflationary pressure. The inflationary pressure has caused the Fed to maintain rates higher than the president wants. The president cannot legally compel the Fed chair to comply, so the DOJ was directed to investigate Powell as a pressure mechanism. And now a federal judge has found that investigation was a bad faith enterprise. The entire legal and political spiral traces back to a single military decision and its cascading downstream effects. And the administration is now trapped in legal jeopardy over its attempt to strong-arm an independent institution that was simply responding appropriately to the economic conditions that the administration's own policy created. A bad faith finding against the Department of Justice is not a minor legal setback that can be spun away with a press release. It is a fundamental credibility wound for an administration that has been systematically employing law enforcement as a tool of political discipline. The administration has wielded the threat and reality of DOJ investigation as an instrument of pressure against Powell, against media organizations, against political opponents, against anyone perceived as obstructing the president's objectives.

[00:19:30]That entire strategy of institutional intimidation depends on the DOJ being perceived as a legitimate law enforcement body whose investigations are moored to genuine legal concerns. A bad faith finding, a ruling from a federal judge that the DOJ was not acting in pursuit of legitimate law enforcement objectives, strips that legitimacy from the specific investigation it addresses and radiates outward to cast a shadow over every other investigation the DOJ has conducted or threatened under this administration. It plants the question of whether those other investigations were similarly animated by political purposes rather than genuine law enforcement concerns. The bad faith finding functions as a domino. It does not automatically topple other specific investigations, but it creates a legal and political atmosphere in which every DOJ action is now subject to the additional scrutiny of whether it was conducted in good faith or in service of some concealed political objective. That scrutiny, applied broadly by courts, by the press, and by an increasingly attentive public, is the most corrosive possible consequence of the ruling for an administration relied so heavily on the Justice Department as a political instrument. The emergency Supreme Court appeal broadcasts desperation with a volume that is impossible to mute.

[00:20:47]Emergency petitions to the Supreme Court are reserved for situations where the petitioner believes that irreparable harm will result if the lower court ruling is not immediately frozen. The administration filing an emergency petition in response to a bad faith finding against the conduct of its own Justice Department is is a signal of how gravely it assesses the potential consequences of permitting that finding to stand unchallenged. If the Supreme Court grants the emergency stay, if it agrees to hear the case and pauses the lower court ruling pending its review, the administration receives temporary relief and a chance to argue its position before the nation's highest judicial authority, but the bad faith finding is not erased from the legal record. The finding exists. It has been rendered, and the Supreme Court's decision on the emergency petition will itself become a major story, either validating the administration's argument that the lower court overreached or confirming that the bad faith finding is sufficiently supported by the evidentiary record that emergency intervention is unwarranted. Either outcome carries political significance, and the outcome that is most probable, that the Supreme Court denies the emergency stay as it typically does in cases where the lower court finding is specific, evidence-based, and grounded in a thorough factual record, is also the most damaging for the administration's legal position and its political narrative as the midterm elections approach. This ruling combines with the broader pattern of judicial resistance we have been meticulously documenting to construct a narrative that is becoming one of the most politically significant stories of the entire second term. We have now cataloged a sustained sequence of institutional pushback against administration conduct. The public broadcasting defunding order blocked, the media executive orders reversed, the election-related executive orders halted, the emergency powers expansion rejected by the Senate on constitutional overreach grounds, the Supreme Court attendance norm violated with justices pushing back in oral arguments, the reporters files access refused on distrust grounds, and now the Department of Justice investigation of the Federal Reserve chair found to have been conducted in bad faith. Each of these instances involves a different court, a different legal issue, a different institutional context, but the pattern woven across all of them is identical.

[00:23:08]Courts and institutions are consistently determining that this administration is operating beyond its legal authority, in bad faith, or in ways that transgress constitutional norms. That pattern, visible across multiple independent judicial findings rendered by judges of varied backgrounds and appointments, is not something that can be casually dismissed as a biased judiciary or a politically rigged legal system. It is the legal system performing its constitutional function and consistently arriving at the same conclusion about the character of this administration's conduct. And that pattern is going to be woven into the political narrative that shapes the midterm environment through coverage, through campaign arguments, through the accumulating sense among voters across the political spectrum that something is being checked that genuinely needed to be checked. The economic irony forms a complete and inescapable policy failure loop that arrives in the political narrative at the most damaging possible moment. The causal chain is elegant in its destructive coherence. The president authorized military strikes against Iran. Those strikes produced an oil price shock. The oil shock contributed to inflationary pressure across the entire economy. That inflationary pressure is the primary reason the Federal Reserve chair is not cutting interest rates because the Fed's institutional mandate is price stability and cutting rates into an inflationary environment would constitute a dereliction of that mandate. The president wants the rate cuts for transparently political reasons connected to the approaching midterm elections. The Fed chair will not comply because of inflation caused by the president's own military decision. The president directed the Department of Justice to investigate the Fed chair, apparently as a mechanism of pressure or as a pretext for removal. A federal judge examined that investigation and found it was conducted in bad faith.

[00:24:59]Now, the president is directing the Justice Department to seek emergency Supreme Court intervention to escape the consequences of that finding. Every strand of this legal and political catastrophe traces back to the decision to strike Iran, a single policy choice whose cascading consequences have been generating political, economic, diplomatic, and legal fallout for months. The administration finds itself ensnared in legal jeopardy over the Fed chair investigation because it attempted to pressure an independent institution that was responding appropriately to an inflationary environment created by the administration's own hand, and the spectacle of a president trapped in a crisis entirely of his own manufacture is the kind of narrative that political opponents can wield to devastating effect when arguing that the administration fundamentally fails to comprehend the consequences of its own decisions. Here is the bottom line, delivered with the clarity this moment demands. A federal judge examined the Justice Department's investigation of the Federal Reserve chairman and ruled that it was conducted in bad faith, a specific legal finding that the machinery of prosecution was deployed for purposes other than the legitimate enforcement of the law. The administration, reeling from the implications, directed loyalist prosecutors to seek emergency Supreme Court intervention in a desperate attempt to nullify that ruling and escape its consequences. The Supreme Court must now determine how to handle an emergency petition from an administration whose conduct has been judicially determined to be legally improper. This unfolds in the same concentrated week that contains the Pope attack, the ballroom backlash, the exposure of the cost deception, the viral Rubio moment, the legislative revolt, and the impeachment filing. All of it is erupting simultaneously, and all of it nourishes the same accumulating narrative of an administration that is repeatedly testing and frequently exceeding the boundaries of its legal and constitutional authority, only to collide with institutional resistance from courts, from senators, from international partners, from fiscal conservatives within its own party, and from the spiritual leader of a billion Catholics. The question that will be answered in the approaching election is not whether any single one of these stories is individually decisive. It is whether the accumulated weight of all of them, the pattern, the density, the unrelenting accumulation of institutional rebuke, produces a political environment that lies beyond the administration's capacity to reverse through any volume of communications management or tactical recalibration. At this juncture, the answer to that question sharpens into focus with each successive week.