Judge Concludes Grand Jury Subpoena to Fed Had Improper Purpose

"There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas' dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will. On the other side of the scale, the Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President."

From Chief Judge James Boasberg's opinion Friday in In re Grand Jury Subpoenas, Bd. of Governors of the Federal Reserve System v. U.S.:

"Jerome 'Too Late' Powell has done it again!!! He is TOO LATE, and actually, TOO ANGRY, TOO STUPID, & TOO POLITICAL, to have the job of Fed Chair. He is costing our Country TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS …. Put another way, 'Too Late' is a TOTAL LOSER, and our Country is paying the price!" That [Truth Social post] is one of at least 100 statements that the President or his deputies have made attacking the Chair of the Federal Reserve and pressuring him to lower interest rates. So is this: "'Too Late' Jerome Powell is costing our Country Hundreds of Billions of Dollars. He is truly one of the dumbest, and most destructive, people in Government …. TOO LATE's an American Disgrace!"

Yet the President has been unable to push rates lower through social-media posts. He has thus hinted at other options: "I want to get him out …." Several months ago, he mused that if the Fed does not cut rates, "I may have to force something." Appointed officials and the White House Press Secretary have taken up the call. See … Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte calling on Congress to investigate Powell …; … White House Press Secretary announcing that "the administration, led by the president, is looking into" Fed's renovations ….

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office has recently opened a criminal investigation into Powell. It has served two subpoenas on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, seeking records about recent renovations of the Board's buildings and testimony that Powell delivered to Congress that briefly discussed those renovations. The Board has now responded with a Motion to Quash, contending that the subpoenas are merely part of the gameplan to pressure Powell to bend to the President's wishes or to get rid of him.

The case thus asks: Did prosecutors issue those subpoenas for a proper purpose? The Court finds that they did not. There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas' dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.

On the other side of the scale, the Government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the President. The Court must thus conclude that the asserted justifications for these subpoenas are mere pretexts. It will therefore grant the Board's Motion to Quash. It will also grant the Board's Motion to Partially Unseal the Motion to Quash, related briefing, and this Opinion….

Surveying precedents, the Court distills four lessons. First, courts have recognized two improper purposes that seem especially relevant here. For one, prosecutors may not use the grand jury "to engage in arbitrary fishing expeditions" or to "select targets of investigation out of malice or an intent to harass." So if they singled out an opponent of the President "out of malice" or "to harass" him, including by fishing around for some crime to pin on him, that would not be kosher.

Separately, Trump v. Vance suggests that if prosecutors are forbidden from meddling with an official's duties, then they cannot use criminal investigations to pressure him into enacting their preferred policies. In Vance, state prosecutors had issued grand-jury subpoenas seeking financial records concerning President Trump and his businesses. The Court did not decide whether those subpoenas were proper, but it warned that state DAs cannot use grand-jury subpoenas to "interfer[e] with a President's official duties." It reasoned that because the Supremacy Clause bars state prosecutors from interfering in the President's policy decisions, they cannot turn to subpoenas to try to "manipulate a President's policy decisions" or to "retaliate against a President for official acts." That warning extended a well-established principle: "[A] government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly …."

As noted above, the President and his appointees may not interfere with the Fed Chair's choices about monetary policy. Vance thus suggests that, in addition, the President's appointees may not use grand-jury subpoenas to pressure the Chair to take certain official actions or to retaliate against him for policies that they dislike.

While those two improper purposes seem especially relevant here, the caselaw's second teaching is that an abusive purpose need not be clearly identified in precedents for a court to deem it improper. Instead, improper purposes are as numerous and protean as are the opportunities for prosecutors to misuse their power. Consider the expansive (and expanding) list that courts have identified, often for the first time in the case then at bar. For example, prosecutors cannot harass a target with subpoenas "with no expectation that any testimony concerning the commission of a crime would be forthcoming." They may not use grand-jury subpoenas to get evidence for a separate civil case, thereby evading the rules of civil discovery. Or to get evidence for an already-indicted criminal case, thus skirting criminal discovery. Or to demand details that are irrelevant to the crime under investigation but that would chill a target's First Amendment rights. Or to subpoena journalists in bad faith, solely to expose confidential sources. Or to drag a witness before the grand jury over and over in the hopes that he might contradict himself and so expose himself to a perjury prosecution.

With varied improper purposes popping up on different occasions, it is clear that such purposes cannot be reduced to a fixed and exhaustive list. In none of the cases above did the court take a subpoena's purportedly improper purpose, hold it up to the list of improper purposes that other courts had already recognized, and say that a match was required. Instead, when new facts present new ways that prosecutors might be abusing their subpoena power, courts do not hesitate to declare those purposes improper.

Returning to the case at hand, while these subpoenas' purpose would be improper if it resembled the forbidden purposes identified in R. Enterprises and Vance, that is not necessary. The Court would still quash them if they were issued for an improper purpose that prior cases had no occasion to identify.

Third, the Government is not necessarily acting for a proper purpose just because it seeks information relevant to a criminal investigation. Someone can move to quash a subpoena because it is irrelevant or because it serves an improper purpose. A subpoena thus might be quashed because it is irrelevant, regardless of its purpose. Or it could be quashed for having an improper purpose, even though it asked for information relevant to a criminal investigation. Consider a subpoena hunting for evidence in an already-indicted case: it is plainly seeking relevant evidence, yet it is an improper purpose to use the grand jury to bolster trial testimony. Applying that principle here, the subpoenas are certainly relevant to a criminal investigation. Yet if they constitute an improper use of the grand jury, then they have an improper purpose.

Fourth, the strength of a movant's evidence of an improper purpose determines how much the Government must show to substantiate its asserted proper purpose. To be clear, the movant bears the burden of showing an improper purpose. That burden is heavy, since it requires "rebutting the presumption of regularity attached to a grand jury's proceeding." And that presumption cannot be rebutted by mere speculation or conjecture.

That said, if the movant overcomes the presumption, then the Government's burden to justify a subpoena will depend on how much evidence of an improper purpose the movant puts forth. That follows naturally from seeking a subpoena's dominant purpose: the more evidence there is that the purpose is improper, the more is needed to show that a proper purpose nonetheless dominated. Since a grand-jury subpoena's proper purpose is investigating suspicious facts that might suggest a crime, that means showing a stronger basis for such investigation….

With those lessons in hand, the Court applies them to the facts….

The Board contends that the Government issued these subpoenas for the improper purpose of harassing and pressuring Powell to push the Fed to lower interest rates or to resign and make way for a more pliant Chair. There can be little debate that such purpose would be improper. As just discussed, existing caselaw warns that prosecutors may not "select [a] target[ ] of investigation out of malice or an intent to harass." And it implies that if prosecutors—or the President who appointed and can fire them—are legally barred from interfering in an official's policy choices, they may not use grand-jury subpoenas in an "attempt to influence" him or to "retaliate against [him] for official acts." True, no case says that federal prosecutors cannot target the head of an independent agency to pressure him to knuckle under or step aside. That purpose would still be improper, though: it would sic prosecutions on people because the President dislikes them, use criminal subpoenas as a form of official coercion, and thwart statutes protecting the agency's independence. Even if nobody has tried that before, a novel improper purpose is improper all the same.

What the Court must determine is whether the Board is correct in its inference. In other words, what is these subpoenas' dominant purpose? A mountain of evidence suggests that the dominant purpose is to harass Powell to pressure him to lower rates. [For more details, see the opinion. -EV] …

True, most of the evidence above speaks to the motives of the President, not the U.S. Attorney's Office. Yet judges "are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free." The U.S. Attorney was appointed by the President and can be fired by him. Her peer one district over was recently pushed out for refusing to prosecute the President's opponents. The signal to other U.S. Attorneys was hard to miss. Indeed, this U.S. Attorney's Office has targeted the President's opponents before. Compare, e.g., Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Truth Soc. (Nov. 20, 2025, at 9:17 AM), https://perma.cc/6CKS-7LPA (reposting article about Democratic members of Congress who posted video telling service members to refuse illegal orders and commenting, "This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???"), with Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush & Michael S. Schmidt, Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress, N.Y. Times (Feb. 10, 2026), https://perma.cc/TY69-XV55 (D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office then tried to indict all six of those congresspeople). It is a natural inference that the President's appointee was responding to his desires (whether real or perceived) here.

Against such extensive and persuasive evidence of improper motive, the Government counters with only a tenuous assertion of a legitimate purpose. In its briefing, the Government's sole justification for investigating the renovation is that it went "far over budget, raising the specter of fraud." But buildings often go over budget. That fact, standing alone, hardly suggests that a crime occurred. Nor is there any reason to think that this project was especially prone to fraud. On the contrary, the Board's "independent Inspector General … has had full access to project information on costs, contracts, schedules, and expenditures and receives monthly reports on the construction program." He audited the renovation several years ago and raised no concerns about fraud.

As for Powell's testimony, the Government vaguely intimates that it "contained possible discrepancies" and was "possibly problematic." What those discrepancies or problems might be, it does not (or cannot) say. Indeed, most members of the Committee that Powell testified before—including a majority of each party's members, as well as the Committee's Chair—have said that they do not think he committed any crime. Searching for any reason to suspect that Powell might have lied to Congress, the only one the Court can descry is that he testified at a hearing. The Government might as well investigate him for mail fraud because someone once saw him send a letter….

When the evidence of improper motive is so strong and the justifications for these subpoenas are so tenuous, it is hard to see the renovations and testimony as anything other than a convenient pretext for launching a criminal investigation that the Government launched for another, unstated purpose: pressuring Powell to knuckle under. In light of all the evidence, the only reasonable inference is that the Government targeted Powell "out of malice or an intent to harass" and has launched a "fishing expedition[ ]" to either find something to pin on him or to pressure him to fold. That harassment seems aimed at bulldozing the Fed's statutory independence….

Andrew Z. Michaelson, Jeffrey S. Bucholtz, Leah B. Grossi, Nicholas A. Mecsas-Faxon, and Robert K. Hur (King & Spalding) represent the Board.