The Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche, has decided not to resume the case opened against the former chairman of the Federal Reserve (Fed), Jerome Powell, for the cost overruns linked to the renovation works of the headquarters of the U.S. central bank.
"We are not going to reopen a criminal investigation against him," he stated this Friday in an interview with the news agency Bloomberg, in which, however, he left the door open to continue analyzing how the project was managed.
Blanche's words come after the publication of a report from the Office of the Inspector General of the Fed, which concludes that there is no evidence of irregularities on Powell's part regarding the works, valued at 2.4 billion dollars.
The document, with which Blanche said he is "satisfied," does highlight several failures that ended up driving up the cost of the remodeling, whose initial budget in 2020 was set at 1.3 billion dollars.
Even so, the Attorney General has reproached Powell for "inadequate" oversight of the project and has emphasized that if the independent audit commissioned by the current leadership of the Federal Reserve "discovers anything that constitutes some type of criminal conduct, we will investigate it."
Powell's tenure at the helm of the Fed, which ended last May, was marked by a tense relationship with the Trump Administration, due to the persistent pressures from the then-president to lower interest rates, while the "guardian of the dollar" defended the independence of the central bank in setting its monetary policy.