By Connor O’Keeffe

On Sunday night, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced that Trump’s Department of Justice had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment of Powell.

The subpoenas concern statements Powell made to the Senate Banking Committee last summer about renovations to the Eccles Building—the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

Early last year, Trump’s FHFA Director Bill Pulte identified the Fed’s admittedly-opulent, multi-billion dollar renovation project as an opportunity for the administration to put serious pressure on the central bank. The president ran with it, which culminated in the viral argument between Trump and Chairman Powell over the project’s total cost as they both sported hard hats at the Eccles construction site.

The indictment, however, doesn’t accuse Powell of mismanaging federal funds when overseeing the renovation but of lying to Congress about some details of the renovation. In a video response to the issuance of the subpoenas, the Fed chair accused Trump of deceptively feigning concern about the excesses of the project as a “pretext” to pressure the Fed to adopt his preferred monetary policy.

That is obviously the case. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with Donald Trump knows he has no aversion to opulent and extravagant construction projects. If anything, this specific renovation is far more tame than other remodeling projects the president is overseeing. It’s also hard to believe that, days after saying he wants to see the military budget jacked up by half a trillion dollars a year, Trump is genuinely concerned that “mismanagement” of this one construction job might have cost taxpayers a bit too much money. This is obviously about Trump’s ongoing frustration that the Fed is not cutting rates as quickly as he wants.

But Trump is not the only one being deceptive here. As I laid out back in September, the concerns Powell and his many allies at the Fed, in Congress, and in the media usually cite when decrying Trump’s attempt to “takeover” the central bank are just as hard to........

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