Politics

The next steps were unclear, and it was uncertain if additional witnesses might be summoned. But a city mindful of the riot by Trump loyalists at the U.S. Capitol more than two years ago took steps to protect itself from any violence that could accompany the unprecedented prosecution of a former president.

Monday’s testimony from Robert Costello, a lawyer with close ties to numerous key Trump aides, appeared to be a final opportunity for allies to steer the grand jury away from an indictment. Costello was invited by prosecutors to appear after saying he had information to undercut the credibility of Michael Cohen, a former lawyer and fixer for Trump who later turned against him and then became a key witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation.

Costello had provided Cohen legal services several years ago after Cohen himself became entangled in the federal investigation into the hush money payments. In a news conference after his grand jury appearance, Costello told reporters he had come forward because he did not believe Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal crimes and served time in prison.

“If they want to go after Donald Trump and they have solid evidence, then so be it,” Costello said. “But Michael Cohen is far from solid evidence.”

Responding on MSNBC, Cohen said that Costello was never his lawyer and “he lacks any sense of veracity.”

There were no signs that Costello’s testimony had affected the course of the investigation. Cohen had been available for over two hours in case prosecutors wanted him to rebut Costello’s testimony but he was told he was not needed, his attorney said.

New York officials have been monitoring online chatter of threats of varying specificity, but even as portable metal barricades were dropped off to safeguard streets and sidewalks, there were no immediate signs that Trump’s calls for protests were being heeded.

On Tuesday morning, Manhattan court proceedings were temporarily halted by a bomb threat called in via 911, according to a court spokesman. That delayed the start of a hearing in a separate case, the New York attorney general’s lawsuit accusing Trump and his company of a yearslong fraud scheme.

Costello briefly acted as a legal adviser to Cohen after the FBI raided Cohen’s home and apartment in 2018. At the time, Cohen was being investigated for both tax evasion and for payments he helped orchestrate in 2016 to buy the silence of two women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Trump.

For several months, it was unclear whether Cohen, a longtime lawyer and fixer for the Trump Organization who once boasted that he would “take a bullet” for his boss, would remain loyal to the president.

Cohen ultimately decided to plead guilty in connection with the payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal, which he said were directed by Trump. Since then, he has been a vociferous Trump critic, testifying before Congress and then to the grand jury.

Trump, who has denied having sex with either woman, has branded Cohen a liar.

As the New York investigation pushes toward conclusion, Trump faces other criminal probes in Atlanta and Washington that, taken together, pose significant legal peril and carry the prospect of upending his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Some of his likely opponents have tried to strike a balance between condemning a potential prosecution as politically motivated while avoiding condoning the conduct at issue.

“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some kind of alleged affair,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Panama City. “I can’t speak to that.”

Switching to criticism of the district attorney, he said, “What I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star hush money payments, that’s an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of senators in Congress on Monday proposed legislation to raise the mandatory commercial pilot retirement age to 67 from 65, in a bid to address airline industry staffing issues.

The legislation first proposed last year by Republican Lindsey Graham and other Republicans now includes Democrats Joe Manchin and Mark Kelly. The proposal, which would require pilots over age 65 to pass a rigorous medical screening every six months, follows complaints of pilot shortages by many regional airlines.

(Reporting by David Shepardson)

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By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A group of seven U.S. senators on Tuesday proposed legislation to raise the mandatory commercial pilot retirement age to 67 from 65, in a bid to address airline industry staffing issues.

The legislation first proposed last year by Senator Lindsey Graham and other Republicans now includes Democrats Joe Manchin and Mark Kelly, a former Navy pilot and astronaut.

The proposal, which would require pilots over age 65 to pass a rigorous medical screening every six months, follows complaints of pilot shortages by many regional airlines.

It comes as Congress is considering various aviation reforms ahead of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Sept. 30 expiration of operating authority.

Graham said roughly 5,000 pilots will be forced to retire within the next two years. He noted hundreds of flights are being canceled due to a shortage of available pilots and crews.

The Regional Airline Association (RAA) praised the proposal, saying 324 airports have lost, on average, a third of their air service, including 14 small airports that have lost all service, and more than 400 airplanes are parked because of a lack of pilots.

RAA President Faye Malarkey Black in an email said raising the retirement age is “the one solution that will immediately mitigate the pilot shortage, particularly the captain shortage, which is an even more acute constraint within a constraint.”

She added that it also would reduce “wrongheaded age discrimination against healthy pilots.”

The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) opposes proposals to increase the retirement age. Even if the proposal is approved, the union said pilots older than 65 would still not be able to fly in most countries outside the United States because of international rules.

Graham previously noted that in 2007 the United States raised the mandatory retirement age from 60 to 65, and “the sky did not fall.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has previously said he does not support raising the pilot retirement age.

Some have urged the lowering of the number of hours experience needed to be a co-pilot.

The FAA denied a request last year by regional carrier Republic Airways for allowing only 750 hours of flight experience instead of 1,500 hours.

(Reporting by David ShepardsonEditing by Bill Berkrot)

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By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Republican chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee threatened to issue a subpoena if the State Department does not produce documents it has requested related to the August 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the committee said on Tuesday.

Representative Michael McCaul sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken requesting the information before Blinken’s testimony to the committee on Thursday.

The letter, dated March 20, noted that McCaul had sent a comprehensive document request on the withdrawal on Jan. 12, and a follow-up letter on March 3, among other requests.

The State Department generally does not comment on its correspondence with Congress, but is “committed to working with Congress to appropriately accommodate their legitimate need for information to help them conduct oversight for legislative purposes,” a spokesperson said.

Blinken is due to testify to congressional committees in both the Senate and House this week.

Republicans have launched a series of investigations of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration since they took control of the House in January.

McCaul had said even before becoming committee chairman that he wants to look into the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan and events in the country since, noting that there has never been a full accounting of the chaotic operation, in which 13 U.S. service members were killed at Kabul’s airport.

Hundreds of U.S. citizens and many thousands of Afghans who had worked with American forces were left behind.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, additional reporting by Simon Lewis; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Sandra Maler)

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By Karen Freifeld

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York judge on Tuesday rejected former U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid to delay the scheduled Oct. 2 trial in state Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit, calling the date “written in stone.”

Justice Arthur Engoron in Supreme Court in Manhattan agreed to requests by Trump and other defendants to push back some deadlines for gathering evidence.

“You can move anything else in between,” the judge told lawyers at a two-hour hearing, which was delayed by a bomb scare. “I don’t want to move that trial date.”

The schedule means the former president could face trial in James’ case just two blocks from the Manhattan criminal court building where he is expecting to be indicted for covering up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Both cases come during Trump’s third White House run, in which he is a leading Republican candidate.

James sued Trump, three of his adult children, the Trump Organization and others last September over an alleged decade-long scheme to manipulate more than 200 asset valuations and Trump’s net worth, to win better terms from banks and insurers.

The attorney general has long accused Trump of stalling to delay her case.

On Monday, she accused the Trump Organization’s accounting firm of failing to produce documents she subpoenaed and improperly asserting privilege.

Trump has called James’ case a partisan witch hunt.

He had originally sought a delay that would have likely pushed any trial to the spring of 2024, when the race to become the Republican presidential nominee might be sewn up.

James countered that her office had already turned over “enormous” quantities of evidence to the defendants, enough to prevent any trial from “becoming a game of surprise.”

Engoron also said many disputes are easy to resolve, including whether Trump overstated the value of his Trump Tower penthouse apartment by inflating its size.

“A triplex apartment is worth less money if is 11,000 square feet than if it is 30,000 square feet,” he said. “You do not need to be an expert … to know these things. You don’t even need a high school diploma.” 

Among the other defendants are Trump’s adult children Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, and the jailed former Trump Organization chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Trump, said the defendants’ confidence is growing as they learn more about James’ case.

“Once everybody knows exactly what happened, then they’re going to see that President Trump has done absolutely nothing wrong,” he said.

Asked later by a Reuters reporter about the trial date being set in stone, Kise said: “For now, it is.”

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld in New York; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stempel; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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By Nathan Layne and Gram Slattery

(Reuters) – Donald Trump will try to turn any indictment to his advantage by stoking anger among core supporters over what they see as the weaponization of the justice system, though it may also push more Republicans tired of the drama around him to look for another presidential candidate.

A Manhattan grand jury could bring charges as soon as this week against the former Republican president for alleged hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford.

While the prosecution of a former president is unprecedented in U.S. history and places Trump in legal peril, it will likely be viewed by his most loyal supporters as politically motivated and only harden their determination to back him in the 2024 Republican primary, party officials, strategists and political analysts told Reuters.

“I think this will strengthen the resolve of his supporters,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who represented Trump in many media appearances during the 2020 presidential campaign.

But to win the party’s nomination, Trump will likely have to broaden his support beyond the 25%-30% of the Republican electorate generally thought to be in his corner no matter what, especially if the field of Republican candidates narrows in the coming months. An indictment could make it difficult for him to broaden his appeal.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said some Republicans could be swayed by the charges to back Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or another potential candidate without Trump’s legal baggage, which has grown considerably since he left the White House in 2021.

“It’s not good for Trump, the question is how bad for Trump it is,” said Sabato. “There could be multiple indictments … it begins to add up to a major problem.”

Trump’s campaign has accused the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, as well as prosecutors pursuing separate cases against him in Georgia and at the federal level, of doing the bidding of Democrats out to stop his re-election campaign.

People close to Trump said his campaign would seek to frame the indictment as proof that all prosecutions – including his two impeachments in Congress – are unjustified attempts by the “Deep State” to undermine him and his supporters.

Trump will have more social media outlets to get his message across after YouTube became the latest platform to reinstate him on Friday. Trump was cut off from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has now been reinstated on all three, giving him a powerful megaphone to rally his base, as he did effectively during his 2016 White House run.

It is unclear how Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination will approach the indictment, although several have already made clear they view any attempt to charge Trump as politically motivated.

Sam DeMarco, chair of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, said candidates will likely allude to the need for less drama without explicitly calling Trump out.

DeSantis got a taste of that on Monday when he criticized what he said was the politicization of the Manhattan DA’s office but also took a veiled swipe at his rival. Trump responded aggressively with an innuendo-filled post on his Truth Social platform.

‘TEFLON DON’

DeMarco said Republicans would view the Manhattan indictment as political, given that federal prosecutors reviewed the Daniels case in 2018 and decided not to charge Trump, although it is Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president.

Republicans would take a similar view of any charges arising out of the ongoing investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, into Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden there, said DeMarco, who plans to vote for DeSantis should he run.

Trump has defied predictions of his demise numerous times since he launched his bid for the White House in 2015. Sometimes called “Teflon Don” for his record of skirting accountability, Trump once bragged that he could gun down someone in the middle of Manhattan and not face consequences.

Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite the emergence of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which he made vulgar comments about women. And in 2018, when he was president, he paid no apparent political price for the Stormy Daniels affair, even as his lawyer went to prison for arranging the payments and pointed the finger at Trump.

Trump remains the front-runner in the 2024 Republican field, with the support of 44% of Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday, ahead of DeSantis’ 30% support.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut, and Gram Slattery in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin, Daniel Wallis and Lisa Shumaker)

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By Nathan Layne and Gram Slattery

(Reuters) -Donald Trump will try to turn any indictment to his advantage by stoking anger among core supporters over what they see as the weaponization of the justice system, though it may also push more Republicans tired of the drama around him to look for another presidential candidate.

A Manhattan grand jury could bring charges as soon as this week against the former Republican president for alleged hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford.

While the prosecution of a former president is unprecedented in U.S. history and places Trump in legal peril, it will likely be viewed by his most loyal supporters as politically motivated and only harden their determination to back him in the 2024 Republican primary, party officials, strategists and political analysts told Reuters.

“I think this will strengthen the resolve of his supporters,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist who represented Trump in many media appearances during the 2020 presidential campaign.

But to win the party’s nomination, Trump will likely have to broaden his support beyond the 25%-30% of the Republican electorate generally thought to be in his corner no matter what, especially if the field of Republican candidates narrows in the coming months. An indictment could make it difficult for him to broaden his appeal.

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said some Republicans could be swayed by the charges to back Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or another potential candidate without Trump’s legal baggage, which has grown considerably since he left the White House in 2021.

“It’s not good for Trump, the question is how bad for Trump it is,” said Sabato. “There could be multiple indictments … it begins to add up to a major problem.”

Trump’s campaign has accused the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, as well as prosecutors pursuing separate cases against him in Georgia and at the federal level, of doing the bidding of Democrats out to stop his re-election campaign.

People close to Trump said his campaign would seek to frame the indictment as proof that all prosecutions – including his two impeachments in Congress – are unjustified attempts by the “Deep State” to undermine him and his supporters.

Trump will have more social media outlets to get his message across after YouTube became the latest platform to reinstate him on Friday. Trump was cut off from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has now been reinstated on all three, giving him a powerful megaphone to rally his base, as he did effectively during his 2016 White House run.

It is unclear how Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination will approach the indictment, although several have already made clear they view any attempt to charge Trump as politically motivated.

Sam DeMarco, chair of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County, said candidates will likely allude to the need for less drama without explicitly calling Trump out.

DeSantis got a taste of that on Monday when he criticized what he said was the politicization of the Manhattan DA’s office but also took a veiled swipe at his rival. Trump responded aggressively with an innuendo-filled post on his Truth Social platform.

‘TEFLON DON’

DeMarco said Republicans would view the Manhattan indictment as political, given that federal prosecutors reviewed the Daniels case in 2018 and decided not to charge Trump, although it is Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president.

Republicans would take a similar view of any charges arising out of the ongoing investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, into Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden there, said DeMarco, who plans to vote for DeSantis should he run.

Trump has defied predictions of his demise numerous times since he launched his bid for the White House in 2015. Sometimes called “Teflon Don” for his record of skirting accountability, Trump once bragged that he could gun down someone in the middle of Manhattan and not face consequences.

Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite the emergence of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which he made vulgar comments about women. And in 2018, when he was president, he paid no apparent political price for the Stormy Daniels affair, even as his lawyer went to prison for arranging the payments and pointed the finger at Trump.

Trump remains the front-runner in the 2024 Republican field, with the support of 44% of Republicans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Monday, ahead of DeSantis’ 30% support.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut, and Gram Slattery in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin, Daniel Wallis and Lisa Shumaker)

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By Gram Slattery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Former President Donald Trump’s call to supporters to protest what he said was his imminent arrest provoked conspiracy-fueled debate on far-right social media platforms on Monday, with some supporters fearing an elaborate government trap to arrest them.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform on Saturday he expected to be arrested this week for alleged hush money payments to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign and urged supporters to “protest, take our nation back!”

Critics worried his comments could provoke a repeat of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when his supporters tried to overturn his 2020 presidential election defeat.

Security analysts who monitor far-right chatter on social media, said initially the impulse of Trump’s followers was to heed his call and hit the streets. But by Monday, the tone had shifted, according to the analysts and messages on several social media platforms examined by Reuters.

Many far-right grassroots activists appeared to see Trump’s possible arrest in the coming days as part of a trap set by Democrats to lure supporters into a riot that will ultimately hurt the Republican former president’s chances of winning back the White House in 2024 from Democratic President Joe Biden.

“We obviously are tracking various discussions both in extremist spaces and more broadly, and not surprisingly there’s a variety of reactions,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish American organization which promotes civil rights.

“QAnon-related folks and some MAGA adherents are talking about how this is one big trap in some cases, that this is an operation intended to get (Trump’s) supporters in trouble,” Segal said.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory that holds, among other beliefs, that Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of child-sex predators that includes prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and “deep state” allies. Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is a core element of his support base.

The risk of an attack from a lone wolf remains serious, and some form of collective violence is possible, the analysts said. Any violence that results from Trump’s arrest is more likely to emanate from an individual or small cell rather than an action resembling the Jan. 6 attack, they added.

THREE WAVES, THE THIRD IN WACO, TEXAS

“A catalyst like (Trump’s) arrest would be something that would put people who are on the edge over the edge into plotting and carrying out violence,” said Daryl Johnson, a former intelligence official, who served as a senior domestic terrorism analyst at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

He pointed to an August attack on an FBI office in Ohio following a federal raid at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property as the type of violence that could recur. In that instance, an armed man tried to breach an FBI building in Cincinnati and was later shot dead by police following a gun battle.

“Following Trump’s call for protest, we’ve documented three fairly distinct waves of responses on far-right social media,” said Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which researches anti-democratic and discriminatory groups.

“Wave one was a call to attention for Trump loyalty rallies. Almost immediately thereafter there was a second wave of, ‘Don’t protest, it’s a trap just like January 6th,’ that really overtook the first,” Burghart said.

Some right-wing activists have claimed falsely that the Jan. 6 attack was instigated by undercover FBI agents and by antifa, an extreme left-wing movement.

“Most have moved to a third position where they have moved to supporting the Trump rally in Waco next weekend as a sort of compromise,” Burghart added.

Trump is holding his first 2024 campaign rally on Saturday in Waco, Texas.

Activist Laura Loomer, a prominent Trump supporter in Florida, called on Saturday for a “peaceful” Tuesday protest outside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. But she walked that back later in the day, writing in a Twitter thread that it is “best people don’t show up to rally in front of Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday,” as she did not “want there to be any issues.”

She called on supporters to promote Trump’s rally in Waco instead.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson; Editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)

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By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court should dismiss a major case from North Carolina that could give more power over federal elections to state politicians because the matter is being reconsidered by a lower court, North Carolina said in a filing on Monday, while the Republican lawmakers at the center of the dispute disagreed.

The disagreement over the future of the case is the latest flashpoint in litigation that could have a significant impact on U.S. elections in the coming years and decades. The case began as a legal fight over a map drawn by Republican state legislators of North Carolina’s 14 U.S. House of Representatives districts – one that a lower court blocked as unlawfully disadvantageous for Democrats.

The state’s Department of Justice, headed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, said that a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court to revisit its ruling last year invalidating the Republican-drawn map means there is not a final judgment typically needed to trigger a review by the top U.S. judicial body.

The justices should “dismiss this case for lack of jurisdiction” given that the “decisions on review are nonfinal,” the state said.

Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, which had argued against the Republican position when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in December, also suggested that the justices have reason to avoid a decision.

The state lawmakers who defended the Republican-drawn map and some of the plaintiffs who challenged its legality urged the justices to press ahead and issue a ruling in the case.

The Republican lawmakers had urged the U.S. Supreme Court to embrace a once-marginal legal theory now embraced by many conservatives that would remove any role of state courts and state constitutions in regulating presidential and congressional elections.

The legal theory, called the “independent state legislature” doctrine, is based in part on the U.S. Constitution’s statement that the “times, places and manner” of federal elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

In its filing on Monday, Biden’s administration said that the state court’s action could “effectively moot” the part of the case linked to that language in the Constitution.

Neal Katyal, an attorney for Common Cause, a voting rights group that was among the challengers to the map, disagreed: “The court should, if at all possible, decide this question now, rather than on an emergency basis during the 2024 election cycle.”

The justices indicated on March 2 that they were mulling the effect of the lower court’s decision to rehear the case on their ability to issue a decision, and asked the various parties to weigh in on the matter. If the justices decide they no longer have jurisdiction, they could dismiss the case.

Since its decision invalidating the map, the state court has undergone a change in its ideological makeup. In November’s elections, it flipped from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican majority.

At the rehearing last week, several of its conservative members appeared sympathetic toward the Republicans, who control the state legislature and the map-drawing process. An outcome favoring them would boost the party’s chances of maintaining its slim U.S. House majority next year.

During the arguments in December, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared inclined to rule in favor of the Republicans and limit state judicial power to overrule voting policies crafted by state politicians, though perhaps without going as far as the lawmakers wanted.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in Washington. Additional reporting by John Kruzel.)

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By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican U.S. Senator Rick Scott said on Monday he will introduce legislation to create an independent inspector general to oversee the Federal Reserve, as he called the U.S. central bank “unable or unwilling to properly regulate” banks in a letter to Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Scott, a Republican known for his hardline conservative positions, informed Powell of his plans in a March 20 letter that questioned the U.S. central bank’s ability to oversee the banking system, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank earlier this month.

“I am proposing legislation to establish a presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed inspector general for the Federal Reserve,” Scott told Powell in the letter. “Would you support adding this much-needed level of accountability?”

“For too long, the Federal Reserve has used its claim of independence to thwart Congress and the American people while being unable or unwilling to properly regulate and supervise the large financial institutions under its care,” Scott wrote.

There was no immediate response from the Fed.

Scott is expected to introduce the legislation later this week, according to an aide.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have pledged tighter oversight of banking regulators following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which has been followed by billions of dollars in losses for financial stocks.

The Federal Reserve is responsible for supervising – monitoring, inspecting and examining – certain financial institutions to ensure that they comply with rules and regulations, and that they operate in a safe and sound manner.

Some lawmakers have singled out the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank for criticism, among them Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who told an interviewer on Sunday that she does not have faith in the bank’s president, Mary Daly.

The San Francisco Fed was responsible for oversight of Silicon Valley Bank.

Scott’s legislation stems from concern in Congress that the Federal Reserve’s current inspector general is not independent enough to serve as a check on the central bank.

When Congress created Inspectors General in the 1970s, the Federal Reserve was a much smaller and less complicated entity, said Andrew Levin, an economics professor at Dartmouth and a former Fed official.

The Fed was assigned an internal IG that reports directly to the Fed board, rather than a completely independent auditor, like the Pentagon or other big agencies.

Scott also urged the Fed chief to use the central bank’s policy meeting this week to examine the bank failures and identify accountable Fed personnel. 

“The failures and malfeasance, not only of these banks, but their regulators, should be at the top of the agenda,” Scott said.

“Before the meeting concludes, it is my expectation that you name the individual(s) being fired for these failures, and make clear your support for significant accountability measures at both the Federal Reserve and our banks.” 

(Reporting by David Morgan and Heather Timmons; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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