Fed urges judge to deny bid to resurrect Jerome Powell probe subpoenas

The Fed's lawyers, in a court filing unsealed Thursday, told Judge James Boasberg that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia failed to come even remotely close to meeting the legal threshold for its motion for reconsideration . "The Motion for Reconsideration ... does not even mention — let alone meet — the demanding legal standard that applies to the extraordinary relief it seeks," the Fed's lawyers wrote in the motion in U.S. District Court in Washington. The attorneys said "reconsideration is warranted only" when there has been a change in the law related to the issues in the case, when there is new evidence, or if "there is a need to correct clear error or prevent manifest injustice." None of those have occurred, the lawyers said. "The Motion [by prosecutors] does not try to clear these high hurdles, resorting instead to mischaracterizations of the Court's opinion ... and the record on which it rests," the lawyers wrote. The Fed's argument was expected, given that the board sought to block the subpoenas to the central bank in the first place, having said that they and the criminal probe were mere pretexts to get Powell to agree to cut interest rates more quickly and more sharply, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded. "Moron at the Fed" Trump, during comments to reporters at the White House on Thursday, called Powell a "moron at the Fed." That echoed similar past scathing remarks Trump has made about the chair, which Boasberg quoted at length in his decision as evidence that, "In sum, the President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this troublesome Fed Chair." It is not clear when Boasberg will rule on the dueling motions, or whether U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro will drop her office's investigation of Powell if she loses her bid to get the judge to reverse his March 11 ruling. Pirro's office, in its March 12 motion for reconsideration, argued that Boasberg's ruling "applied an incorrect legal standard, erred wi...