Sen. Thom Tillis praised President Donald Trump’s nominee for Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, but he maintained that he will not support Warsh as long as Trump is investigating the current chair, Jerome Powell.
“I look forward to supporting your nomination, and I look forward to this investigation being taken down,” the North Carolina Republican told Warsh on Tuesday as the nominee testified before the Senate Banking Committee.
Tillis celebrated Warsh’s “impeccable” credentials.
“I love your opening statement. I love your focus on the independence of the Fed,” Tillis said. “I love the idea of Fed independence with respect to achieving the dual mandate.”
Though Tillis said Warsh is the perfect candidate, he said he is unwilling to vote for him during a criminal investigation into Powell’s construction of the Fed headquarters going over budget.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., opened the investigation in November at President Donald Trump’s bidding, reviewing whether Powell lied to a Senate committee about cost overruns. Federal prosecutors appeared last Tuesday at the construction site for the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Trump nominated Warsh to succeed Powell, but Powell has said he won’t step down until after the current investigation is finished. Powell has also said he will remain as chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors until the Senate confirms a replacement.
Tillis said that a construction project going over budget is not grounds for a criminal investigation.
“There were a variety of reasons why this building went over budget,” Tillis said. “As a matter of fact, if we put everybody in prison in federal government that had had a budget go over, we’d have to reserve an area roughly the size of Texas for a penal colony because of the way government projects work.”
“And the reality is, the overage of inflation-adjusted was about $730 million,” he added, “the majority of which seems to be legitimate.”
He said the $2.5 billion construction project was “not acceptable, unfortunate, but legitimate.”
Tillis said he has a problem with Justice Department attorneys “thinking it would be cute to bring chair Powell under an investigation just a few months before the position was going to be open.”
The senator “can’t go forward” with Warsh “until this bogus investigation is done with,” he said.
“We have got to end this investigation,” he said. “Big DOJ didn’t know about it. The president didn’t know about it. Let’s get rid of this investigation so I can support your confirmation, Mr. Warsh.”
