A federal judge has refused to reverse his decision from last month to block the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) subpoenas of the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell.
The Hill reports US District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, ruled on Friday that the DOJ “did not come close” in getting him to reconsider his earlier ruling. The DOJ served the subpoenas as part of a probe to determine if Powell committed perjury last year during Senate testimony on the cost overruns for the central bank’s $2.5 billion headquarters renovation project.
“The subpoena power ‘is not unlimited’ and may not be abused,” Boasberg wrote in a six-page ruling, adding the DOJ “makes arguments and cites cases about its broad subpoena power and insists that it does not need evidence, but it ignores the fact that its total lack of a good-faith basis to suspect a crime is relevant to the second, separate question of the subpoenas’ true purpose.”
Jeanine Pirro, US Attorney for the District of Columbia, had called Boasberg an “activist judge” when he first blocked the subpoenas last month. Timothy Lauer, a spokesperson Pirro, stated that her office “will absolutely appeal the judiciary’s interference with our access to the grand jury.”
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