Claire Jones

Hi, Sonia.

So the Department of Justice said it needed to investigate Fed Chair Jay Powell's handling of

of a 2.5 billion renovation of the Fed's headquarters.

They said they were looking into whether or not he'd misled Congress over the project, which has cost overruns of around $700 million.

However, Powell denied the allegations and went as far as to say what the probe was actually about was pressure from the Trump administration for Fed officials such as himself to cut US borrowing costs.

There was this dramatic reversal, of course, that we saw on Friday.

And what that really spoke to was just an appreciation from the White House that the

They were not going to get Powell out of the job of Fed chair and Trump's pick to replace him, Kevin Walsh, in on time unless this probe went away.

I think it almost certainly does.

Tillis did have the blocking vote on the Senate Banking Committee.

They'll now vote on Wednesday and probably vote in favor of Walsh moving to a vote on the Senate floor.

The sense we're getting is that all of the Republicans who had objections to Walsh

Those objections were really centering on the probe.

And now that the probe looks as though it's gone away, they're likely to support Walsh.

There's 53 Republicans in the Senate at the moment.

So it looks like Walsh will pass the crucial hurdle of 51 quite easily.

So the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Janine Pirro's remarks on Friday did raise a little bit of concern because she did mention in a post on social media site X that she will not hesitate to restart a criminal investigation should the facts warrant doing so.

The sense we've got from remarks that Tillis made yesterday was that he'd had assurances from the DOJ

that the only way the probe would be reopened was if the Fed's internal inspector general recommended that it do so.

So he seems to have been assured enough by conversations with the DOJ to think that they will not reopen the probe, despite there being some grey area created by Pirro's remarks on Friday.