The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors urged a judge to reject prosecutors’ request that he reconsider his recent decision to block subpoenas issued in a criminal investigation of Chair Jerome Powell over pricey renovations of the central bank’s headquarters and his congressional testimony about that.
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.
