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A federal judge quashed two grand jury subpoenas served on the Federal Reserve Board in the investigation of Chair Jerome Powell, then refused to reconsider. The opinion is unusually blunt about why.
On March 13, 2026, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia quashed two grand jury subpoenas the Justice Department had served on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. On April 3, 2026, he declined to reconsider.
Courts almost never quash grand jury subpoenas. The grand jury's investigative reach is broad by design, and a challenge usually fails unless compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive. What makes this ruling notable is not the outcome alone. It is that the court found the subpoenas were issued for a purpose other than investigating a crime.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Court | U.S. District Court, District of Columbia |
| Judge | James E. Boasberg |
| Subpoenas served | January 2026, on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors |
| Order quashing | March 13, 2026 |
| Reconsideration denied | April 3, 2026 |
| Subject | Records relating to the renovation of the Fed's Washington headquarters and Chair Powell's June 2025 Senate Banking Committee testimony |
| Docket number | Grand jury matters are typically filed under a sealed or miscellaneous docket number. Confirm before citing. |
The Federal Reserve has been renovating its headquarters complex in Washington. The project's cost, reported at roughly 2.5 billion dollars, drew congressional attention, and Chair Jerome Powell testified about it before the Senate Banking Committee in June 2025.
In January 2026 the Justice Department issued two grand jury subpoenas to the Board of Governors seeking records related to that testimony. The Board moved to quash.
A grand jury subpoena is presumptively valid. The party resisting it carries the burden. Under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 17(c), a court may quash a subpoena if compliance would be unreasonable or oppressive. Separately, courts have long held that the grand jury's power may not be used for a purpose other than a good-faith criminal investigation.
That second ground is the one the court reached. As reported by CNN and The Hill, Judge Boasberg wrote that "a mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning," and that the government "has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime." He described "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."
Findings like that are rare because the standard is demanding. A court will not second-guess prosecutorial judgment on a thin record. It quashes on improper purpose when the record makes the purpose obvious.
The sequence is short and the dates matter:
Whether the government noticed an appeal to the D.C. Circuit after reconsideration was denied is not something we could confirm from public sources for this update.
Central bank independence is not written into the Constitution. It rests on statute, on custom, and on the practical expectation that the executive branch will not use law enforcement tools to influence monetary policy. This ruling tests that expectation directly, and it does so through an ordinary procedural device rather than a constitutional holding.
There is a second, quieter point for practitioners. Motions to quash grand jury subpoenas usually fail. This one succeeded because the movant built a record about purpose. That record is a template: contemporaneous statements, timing, and the absence of any predicate for a criminal theory.
Grand jury proceedings are secret, so the public record here is thinner than in ordinary civil litigation. Sealed filings and miscellaneous dockets are the norm, and much of what happened will stay out of view.
Related filings that are public will surface on the district court docket, and any appeal would generate a public D.C. Circuit docket of its own.
Search the current record here: Federal Reserve subpoena litigation. Because grand jury matters can move without warning, case alerts are the practical way to catch an unsealing or a notice of appeal on the day it posts.
The doctrine is stacked against the movant, so the mechanics of winning one are worth extracting from this case.
Build the timeline. Improper purpose is proved with sequence: what was said publicly, when the subpoena issued, and what changed in between.
Show the absence of a predicate. A grand jury does not need probable cause to investigate, but a record with no evidence of a crime makes an alternative explanation for the subpoena more plausible.
Use the government's own statements. Contemporaneous public statements by officials about what they want from the target are admissible and, in this case, decisive.
Ask for the right remedy. Quashing is the strongest relief. Courts more often narrow a subpoena than kill it, so a fallback position matters.
Rule 6(e) makes grand jury matters secret. Filings are commonly sealed, and the case may appear on a miscellaneous docket rather than a criminal one.
What becomes public is usually a redacted opinion after the fact, which is what happened here. If you are researching this area, the opinions are the record, and there is no docket sheet that will show you the rest.
This is one of several 2026 cases about how far the executive branch may reach into bodies Congress built to be insulated from it. The Supreme Court answered the removal-power version of that question in June 2026, overruling a 1935 precedent, which we cover in Trump v. Slaughter. For a statutory rather than constitutional check on a cabinet secretary, see National TPS Alliance v. Noem. And for a court blocking an agency overhaul on process grounds, read the ACIP vaccine litigation.