The Timing of Trump’s Attack on Powell Could Hurt Next Week’s Supreme Court Fight Over the Fed

The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could derail a similar effort to oust another member of the central bank’s board, Lisa Cook, according to legal and financial experts who spoke out on Thursday against what they called a political intimidation campaign.

Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether a D.C. federal judge was right to intervene in President Donald Trump’s attempt to fire Cook from the Fed board of governors in August 2025. A trial court blocked Trump from doing so in September 2025, which Solicitor General D. John Sauer claims was “improper judicial interference with the president’s removal authority.”

But by targeting Powell with grand jury subpoenas and threatening a criminal investigation last week, the DOJ has made it harder for Sauer to credibly argue next week that Trump is actually trying to fire Cook “for cause” — and not simply as part of his plan to take over the Fed.

Lev Menand, a Columbia University law professor who was a high-ranking adviser in the Treasury Department during the Obama administration, said the timing of the subpoenas aimed at Powell creates “a context for the Cook litigation that is going to undermine some of the president’s arguments.”

“It all tends to suggest that the goal here is to take over the Fed, and not whether it’s to figure out whether Cook” actually committed a fireable offense, Menand said on a call on Thursday morning with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Menand and others on the call with Warren warned that a Trump Fed takeover could turn the independent agency into a towering Tammany Hall — able to hand out emergency bailouts and preferential banking status to the president’s allies.

“He can reward himself, enrich his friends, and punish his enemies,” Warren said. “Nothing would stop him from providing special Fed privileges like emergency bailout loans to World Liberty Financial, which last week applied for a federal banking charter.”

That cryptocurrency company appears to have become the Trump family’s primary investment vehicle, listing Trump as “cofounder emeritus,” a title he shares with his longtime billionaire friend and current special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Their sons — Don Jr., Eric and Barron Trump, as well as Alex and Zach Witkoff — are all named as co-founders. Reuters has estimated that what it calls the Trump family’s “global crypto cash machine” has brought them $800 million “in the first half of 2025 alone.”

During the call, Warren noted that with Trump’s attempts to fire Cook and threats to oust Powell, Trump is close to securing a supermajority on the Fed’s board of governors, having already appointed Michelle Bowman in 2018 and Christopher Waller in 2020 during his first term, then last year adding Stephen Miran — whom Warren claimed “continues to hold his White House job” as chair of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“President Donald Trump is doing everything he can so he can take over America’s central bank so it can work for him and his friends,” Warren said.

Warren’s forceful vocal defense of the Federal Reserve may sound surprising to those who know her for her decades-long stark criticism of the central bank’s mishandling of the 2008 financial crisis and its poor track record for regulating runaway financial institutions in a manner largely detached from everyday Americans. However, she and others on the call argued that while the Fed was long overdue for reform, reshaping it in Trump’s image only further violated their consistent calls to make it more accountable.

Rohit Chopra, a former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, addressed the awkward position head-on.

“None of us want to be seen as apologists for the Fed,” he said on Thursday’s call. “But let’s be clear. The answer is to reform the Fed, it’s not to hand over [regulation of] the money supply and these powerful levers to one individual in the White House.”

Warren argued that the “Fed has consistently favored Wall Street over Main Street, but the Fed works best when its decisions are based on data evidence and best interest of the American economy. All of that is under threat now. Donald Trump is waging an all-out war to seize control of the Fed.”