Jeanine Pirro tries to soften her investigation into fed chair Jerome Powell

Less than a day after news of a Department of Justice probe into Federal Reserve Board of Governors Chair Jerome Powell left key senators and veteran economists aghast at the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign against the central bank, the prosecutor overseeing the probe appears to want to calm the waters.

District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro took to X late Monday to claim that her office had requested information from the Federal Reserve about a long-running renovation project that President Donald Trump has accused Powell of mismanaging.

She claimed her office’s requests “were ignored, necessitating the use of legal process” while denying that the subpoenas issued to the Fed were a threat of prosecution against Powell.

“The word ‘indictment’ has come out of Mr. Powell’s mouth, no one else’s. None of this would have happened if they had just responded to our outreach,” Pirro said. “This office makes decisions based on the merits, nothing more and nothing less. We agree with the chairman of the Federal Reserve that no one is above the law, and that is why we expect his full cooperation.”

The federal criminal probe into the central bank chairman burst into view over the weekend after prosecutors served the central bank with grand jury subpoenas seeking Powell’s testimony from last June before the Senate Banking Committee regarding the Fed headquarters renovation.

Trump, who told reporters on Air Force One that he had been unaware of the investigation before being asked about it late Sunday, has latched onto the building product as a potential reason to fire Powell, slamming the $60 million in cost overruns as “really disgraceful” while speaking to reporters in July. The Fed has attributed the extra expenses on what has become a $2.5 billion project to inflation and the need to conduct expensive asbestos abatement work that was not originally expected.

For his part, Powell confirmed the existence of the investigation in an unprecedented videotaped statement where he said the probe was not about his testimony to Congress or the renovations to Fed headquarters.

“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.

The news of the probe into Powell is just the latest in a year-long effort by Trump to browbeat and bully the central bank’s board into juicing the U.S. economy by drastically slashing the interest rates it raised over a period of years during the Biden administration while attempting to combat runaway post-pandemic inflation.

For months, Trump has verbally assailed Powell as “too late” and worse while frequently threatening to use the headquarters renovation debacle as cause to fire him.

During a brief media availability with reporters as he departed the White House for Michigan on Tuesday, Trump claimed recent inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should justify the Fed lowering overnight interest rate that determines the cost for banks to borrow or lend money to each other on an overnight basis.

Trump wants the bank to use rate cuts to stimulate the economy and encourage banks to slash the interest rates they charge for mortgages and to credit card users and has expressed a desire to have more control over monetary policy that has long been the Fed’s exclusive purview.

Asked about the investigation, he said Powell’s supervision of the renovation project was “billions of dollars over budget” and called the economist “either … incompetent or … crooked.”

“I don’t know what he is, but he does. certainly he doesn’t do a very good job,” he said.