Justice Department Won't Reopen Criminal Probe of Jay Powell

The US Department of Justice will not reopen a criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell over cost overruns tied to the central bank's building renovation project, a department spokesperson said on Friday.

The decision closes, at least for now, a line of inquiry that had focused on one of the most consequential figures in modern American monetary policy. Powell, who chaired the Fed through a period of aggressive rate tightening and market turbulence, had previously been investigated over the renovation's ballooning costs. That earlier investigation did not produce charges.

Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking to Bloomberg News, which first reported the development, said the department has not ruled out continuing to examine the project's oversight. Blanche indicated the DOJ could still potentially take action if evidence of wrongdoing came to light, according to his comments to Bloomberg.

That caveat matters. The spokesperson's confirmation that no criminal probe is being reopened does not amount to a full exoneration or a final administrative judgment on the renovation project itself. Blanche's framing keeps a conditional pathway open: if new evidence emerges from the oversight of the project, the department retains the option to act.

The case has carried unusual political weight. Kevin Warsh, Powell's successor at the Federal Reserve, now leads an institution whose previous chief was the subject of a Justice Department review — a dynamic that places the renovation controversy at the intersection of law enforcement and the Fed's institutional independence. The spokesperson's statement on Friday draws a clear boundary around the criminal dimension of that controversy: no reopened investigation, no active criminal case.

For Powell, the decision removes a legal cloud. For the Fed, it narrows the renovation saga to questions of oversight and governance rather than criminal accountability — the precise territory Blanche said he may still examine.

The department's position leaves two distinct threads. The first, criminal exposure for the former chair, is now dormant by the DOJ's own statement. The second, the broader question of how the central bank managed a renovation project that produced cost overruns serious enough to trigger a criminal investigation in the first place, remains unresolved. Blanche's comments to Bloomberg signal that the second thread stays alive at the attorney general's discretion.

The practical consequence is a waiting game. Absent new evidence of wrongdoing, no further DOJ action follows from Friday's statement. Should such evidence surface, Blanche has explicitly reserved the option to revisit the matter — a posture that keeps the renovation project, and the oversight failures it may reveal, within the Justice Department's field of view even as the criminal case against Powell himself stays shut.