U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro abandoned her planned appeal of a federal judge's rulings that blocked her criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and instead asked the court on Monday to vacate those decisions entirely, a procedural maneuver that legal observers say is unlikely to succeed and that Fed Chair Jerome Powell has signaled will not satisfy his concerns about political interference.
The move marks a sharp change in strategy for Pirro, who had repeatedly said she would appeal Chief Judge James Boasberg's orders quashing grand jury subpoenas aimed at the Fed. Her appeal was due Monday. Instead of filing it, she asked Boasberg himself to wipe the slate clean, to act, in effect, as though his own rulings never happened.
The practical result: Pirro cannot compel evidence from the Fed for now, the grand jury that issued the subpoenas has expired, and the legal cloud over the central bank persists in a different form. Powell's term as chair expires May 15, and he said last week he intends to stay on the Fed's board until the legal threat is "well and truly over, with transparency and finality."
Pirro opened the probe in November, targeting cost overruns in the Fed's ongoing building renovations and related congressional testimony by Powell. Her office convened a grand jury and subpoenaed the Federal Reserve after it allegedly ignored requests for information, Breitbart reported.
Boasberg quashed those subpoenas in March. His ruling was blunt. The chief judge found that Pirro's office had presented no specific evidence of wrongdoing, while substantial signs pointed to a different motive altogether.
As Boasberg wrote in his order:
"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."
He upheld that ruling in April. The back-to-back losses left Pirro with one conventional path forward: appeal to a higher court. She talked about doing exactly that, repeatedly. But appeals normally require approval from a top Department of Justice official, because they can create precedents that work against the DOJ in future cases. Whether Pirro ever secured that sign-off remains unclear.
Instead of testing the appellate courts, she filed Monday's motion to vacate. In it, she acknowledged that the grand jury term had expired. But she also left the door open, noting that a new investigation could still be forthcoming.
Pirro framed the filing as a continuation of the fight, not a retreat. CNBC reported her statement:
"We continue to litigate Judge Boasberg's illegal quashing of our subpoenas in order that it no longer stand and to prevent it from spawning any legal consequences."
Sean P. Murphy, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who has argued before Boasberg and briefed the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, offered a skeptical assessment of the filing's prospects. He described the motion to vacate as a request to pretend something never happened.
"A motion to vacate is essentially asking the judge to just pretend something never happened."
Murphy went further, questioning whether Pirro even has the legal standing to make such a request after losing in court. He said the DOJ's internal legal battles are one thing, but erasing a court's adverse ruling is another matter entirely.
"The key difference is that I don't think she has standing to just erase the record of a DOJ loss like that."
Murphy characterized the motion as an attempt at a "massive" retroactive rewrite "on the timeline of this whole debacle." He said Boasberg is not likely to grant it. The chief judge has yet to rule on the latest request.
Powell's response to the shifting legal landscape has been conspicuously deliberate. His term as Fed chair expires May 15, but he said on Wednesday that he would remain on the Fed's board after that date, specifically until he was convinced the legal threat to the institution was resolved.
That language, "well and truly over, with transparency and finality", reads as a direct message to Pirro's office. A motion to vacate, by its nature, does not close a case. It asks a judge to undo prior rulings. And Pirro's own filing made clear that a fresh investigation could follow.
The Fed itself declined to comment on the latest filing. But the institution's posture throughout has been one of resistance, refusing to comply with subpoenas and winning in court twice.
For conservatives who believe the Fed deserves scrutiny, and there are good reasons to think so, given the scale of the renovation spending and the questions about congressional testimony, the problem is not the investigation itself. The problem is how it was conducted, and what a federal judge concluded about its real purpose.
The probe's consequences have extended well beyond the courtroom. Kevin Warsh, President Trump's nominee to succeed Powell as Fed chair, has seen his confirmation tangled up in the investigation's fallout. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, had refused to advance Warsh's nomination while Pirro's probe remained open, National Review reported.
That political reality appears to have driven at least part of Pirro's decision to close the investigation and defer to the Fed's inspector general. Pirro had previously announced she was directing her office to close the probe after Inspector General Michael Horowitz agreed to scrutinize the cost overruns.
"Accordingly, I have directed my office to close our investigation as the IG undertakes this inquiry," Pirro said in a post on X. But she added a warning: "Note well, however, that I will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so."
That conditional language is precisely what has kept the political temperature elevated. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and fellow Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee last week voted against advancing Warsh's confirmation, arguing the nomination should not proceed while the Fed remains under legal threat. Warren was pointed in her assessment of Pirro's maneuvering.
"This is not what it looks like to close a criminal case."
Warren's objection, for once, lands on a legitimate procedural concern, even if her broader opposition to Warsh is driven by the usual partisan calculations. When a prosecutor closes an investigation but simultaneously reserves the right to reopen it, and then files a motion asking a judge to erase the record of her losses, "closed" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Pirro's motion to vacate in the Fed case is not an isolated legal maneuver. She recently filed a similar motion to vacate the convictions of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in cases related to January 6, 2021. The pattern suggests a broader strategy of using vacatur motions to reshape the legal record rather than accepting adverse outcomes or pursuing traditional appeals.
Whether that strategy reflects principled legal judgment or prosecutorial overreach depends on the facts of each case. In the Fed investigation, the facts as found by Boasberg were damaging: no evidence of criminal wrongdoing presented, and substantial reason to believe the subpoenas were a pressure campaign aimed at the Fed chair. Those findings now sit in the court record, exactly where Pirro does not want them.
The question of how federal courts handle administration legal strategies is becoming a recurring theme across multiple fronts. In each case, the tension between executive power and judicial independence plays out in procedural skirmishes that carry real institutional weight.
Boasberg has not indicated when he will rule on Pirro's motion. If he denies it, as Murphy and other legal observers expect, the rulings quashing the subpoenas will stand as binding precedent in the D.C. district court. That would constrain any future grand jury investigation into the same subject matter.
If Boasberg grants the motion, the rulings disappear from the legal record. Pirro would then be free to convene a new grand jury and issue fresh subpoenas without the prior losses hanging over the effort. But granting such a motion after two detailed rulings finding no evidence of wrongdoing would be extraordinary.
Meanwhile, the Horowitz report on the Fed's renovation cost overruns remains pending. Pirro has said she will not commit to ending the investigation permanently if Horowitz finds no criminal wrongdoing. That leaves the Fed, Powell, and Warsh's confirmation all suspended in a legal limbo that Pirro's latest filing did nothing to resolve.
The broader story here is one that Pirro's public comments have not fully addressed: a federal prosecutor opened an investigation, lost twice in court on the merits, let the grand jury expire, announced she was closing the probe, and then asked the judge to erase the record of her defeats, all while reserving the right to start over.
Accountability at the Fed is a worthy goal. But accountability requires evidence, not subpoenas that a federal judge found were designed to coerce rather than investigate. If there are real questions about billions in renovation spending, Inspector General Horowitz is the right person to answer them. A prosecutor who drops a case but refuses to let it stay dropped is not pursuing accountability. She is preserving leverage.
And leverage without evidence is just pressure by another name.
