Court to Trump: Drop Fed

Hey, folks. Joyce Vance here. Treat and I are back with a new episode of the Insider Podcast. This week, we discuss a federal judge's decision to quash subpoenas in the criminal probe of Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell. Then we turn to president Trump's plans to reshape elections and voting driven by his twenty twenty election fraud claims. If you're a member of Cafe Insider, head to the insider feed or click the link in the show notes of this podcast to hear the full analysis. Stay tuned listeners. Stick around for an excerpt from our conversation. And if you're not yet a member, Insiders help support our work and get access to full episodes and other subscriber benefits. We're living in unreasonable times, so join our community of reasonable voices. Head to cafe.com/insider or staytuned.substack.com. Now onto the show. There's one good decision that has been attacked by the Trump administration, which is another hallmark of merit with respect to the decision. Not always, but but often. And it's an extraordinary thing. And, you know, we like to be thematic on the show. And one of the themes of the of the program, given what the news has been and given the MO of the Trump administration, is time and time again, the Trump folks say, well, that's some crazy thing you're doing. That's an unprecedented thing that the judge is doing. That's an unprecedented form of relief that the other side is asking for. The answer to which often is no, no, no. That's not the crazy thing. The crazy thing is the thing you did that caused us and prompted us to ask for the extraordinary relief or to grant the extraordinary relief. And so a general proposition and tradition, and it's not just a tradition, it's it's it's a legal standard, in our system, Joyce, right, is one of the great tools of investigative power that prosecutors have, not just federal prosecutors but all prosecutors in the country, is the power of the subpoena, the grand jury subpoena. And there is almost no limit on the discretion of federal prosecutors to issue subpoenas. There's somebody I was talking to recently. It's a pretty sophisticated lawyer, but not a criminal lawyer who did not appreciate, and maybe some of our listeners don't appreciate, that even though it's called a grand jury subpoena, the grand jury doesn't authorize the subpoena. The grand jury doesn't fill out the subpoena. The grand jury doesn't deliver the subpoena, may not even know about the subpoena. Subpoenas are issued virtually at the unfettered discretion of individual prosecutors around the country, the standard for which is not beyond a reasonable doubt, is not probable cause. I'm not sure exactly how you articulate the standard, but it's very, very low, and it is a tentative law that that you can use a grand jury subpoena, not only to investigate evidence relating to a crime, but to satisfy yourself that a crime was not …