States that allow mail ballots to be counted after Election Day reacted with relief Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Republican effort to outlaw the practice.

A decision favoring the state of Mississippi over the Republican National Committee delivered an immediate reprieve to the 14 states with grace periods for regular mail ballots, as well as heading off what was expected to be a scramble to alter the practice and inform voters just months ahead of the midterm elections.

At least one state, Ohio, had preemptively changed its law in anticipation of a different result from the high court, and 15 other states have such grace periods specifically for military and overseas voters.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said the ruling means “the thousands of voters whose ballots are postmarked on time but received after Election Day still have their voices heard.”

Mail ballots, also called absentee ballots, have been the source of conspiracy theories from President Donald Trump, who groundlessly blames them for his loss in the 2020 election. The RNC and Libertarian Party had sued to overturn a Mississippi law that permits the counting of mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive up to five days later, on grounds that it violated federal law.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that the practice is legal.

“Nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by Election Day,” she wrote, adding that the court considered that very narrow question without wading into more sweeping declarations about absentee voting in general or the authority of Congress versus states over election law.

In Illinois, where mail-in ballots accounted for up to a quarter of this year’s primary vote, the state elections board had budgeted $300,000 for a television and radio ad campaign to educate voters about potential changes to the mail ballot deadline. Spokesman Matt Dietrich said that campaign will be called off after the court’s ruling. Illinois allows mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 14 days.

“Anytime you have a change in the administration of elections that affects voters, it is a big challenge to us to make sure that voters understand what that change is,” he said.

California, which has a seven-day grace period, has been a regular target of Trump and other Republicans who criticize the state’s slow-counting of late-arriving ballots and have used the gap to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber called Monday’s ruling “a win for voters, for the rule of law, and for the future of our democracy.”

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson called the decision a victory for states’ rights, including the ability to set election rules as long as they don’t conflict with federal law.

In addition to California, Illinois and Mississippi, the other states that count regular mail ballots received after Election Day are Alaska, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Data shows that mail ballots are popular options across all 50 states for both Republican and Democratic voters.

Although the RNC was party to the case and not the Trump administration itself, national party committees of a sitting president’s party typically operate in concert with the president’s political strategies. Trump also has effectively taken over operations of the RNC, the GOP’s main fundraising and political operation.

Calling Monday’s ruling “a tremendous loss,” Trump used it as a way to push his sweeping election law bill that has stalled on Capitol Hill despite Republican control in both chambers of Congress.

In a Truth Social post, the president declared it “more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” his name for legislation that would require voters nationally to document their U.S. citizenship to register to vote, show certain photo identification to cast ballots and limit who can vote with a mail ballot. RNC Chairman Joe Gruters issued a statement aligning with Trump, saying Monday’s ruling was justification to pass the congressional proposal.

Lower federal courts have issued rulings blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to impose new restrictions on mail ballots and to create a national voter list, among other proposed changes. Judges in those cases have consistently said the Constitution vests authority for setting election rules with Congress and the states, not the president.

While Barrett framed Monday’s opinion on the narrower question of the mail ballot deadline, the decision could bolster hopes among Democrats that the high court will look skeptically on the president’s assertion of power over elections if other cases land before it.

Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said he was relieved because the ruling was a potential sign that other cases could go Democrats’ way. But he accused the president and RNC of trying to disenfranchise voters and said he was alarmed by the narrow 5-4 decision in the case.

“What’s troubling was that so many of the other justices were willing to sacrifice the rights of voters,” said Galvin, a Democrat.

Perhaps nowhere was the case being watched more closely than Alaska, where Native and rural communities dotted across a vast landscape rely on the state’s grace period to ensure their ballots get counted. Planes are often the only way ballots can get from polling locations to counting locations.

Jacqueline De León, a senior staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, was among the attorneys who filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of Alaska Native and Native American groups. The brief highlighted the challenges they face, in particular where many communities are accessible only by air or water and rely on air service for mail.

“For many Native communities, voting by mail is shaped by long distances to election offices, no home mail delivery, unreliable postal service, lack of access to transportation, and the realities of living in rural and remote areas,” she said. “Ballots cast by election deadlines should not be discarded simply because substandard service or weather delays cause them to arrive after Election Day.”

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Associated Press writers Bill Barrow and Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta, Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, Josh Kelety in Phoenix, Ali Swenson in New York and graphic artist Kevin Vineys in Washington contributed to this report.

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, June 29 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked the U.S. agency that oversees union elections for federal employees from shifting authority over all labor representation decisions to its top body, which is dominated by Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump.

Chief U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston sided with eight unions who had sued to prevent the Federal Labor Relations Authority from stripping its regional directors of their decades-old power to decide cases themselves by having its three-member body of presidential appointees handle all of them.

Casper, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said FLRA’s action is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act as the agency failed to provide an adequate explanation for why it was revoking a system that since 1983 it had deemed necessary to increase efficiency.

She said shifting to a system in which the FLRA’s three-member body must reach a collective decision on all matters “will increase not just the Authority’s caseload, but the processing and adjudication times for representation matters as well.”

The FLRA did not respond to a request for comment.    

Unions including the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Government Employees sued in April after the agency announced a new policy that would alter a system that has been in place under a rule adopted during Republican President Ronald Reagan’s tenure in 1983.

Under that rule, the three-member body has delegated to career, nonpartisan directors of five regional offices the ability to determine when proposed bargaining units are appropriate, order and supervise elections, and certify the results.

 A small fraction of election results — just six out of 277 cases in 2025 — are challenged in appeals decided by the three-member panel.

The FLRA today has a 2-1 majority of Republicans appointed by Trump. It said the old system resulted in duplicative filings and was time consuming and that, going forward, most election petitions would go directly to the panel, which will “work collaboratively” with regional directors.

The unions argued the FLRA violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to explain how shifting the 98% of mundane cases the three-member body normally does not hear to those presidential appointees would streamline anything.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Edward Tobin)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A conservative law professor known for his expansive views of presidential power and for decades-old memos that justified harsh interrogation techniques after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks says he will be advising a team of prosecutors investigating whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired against President Donald Trump.

John Yoo confirmed in an email to The Associated Press on Monday that he would be assisting Joe diGenova, the former Justice Department prosecutor who was assigned in April to investigate whether officials, who over the last decade scrutinized Trump, participated in a criminal conspiracy against the Republican president.

“He’s a lawyer. He’s going to be helping us,” diGenova said in a brief telephone interview about Yoo. He did not elaborate.

A law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Yoo was a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who served as a lead author of the so-called “torture memos” that government officials used to justify using “enhanced interrogation” techniques on potential terror suspects. The Justice Department later rescinded the memos.

In the years since, he’s remained a prominent proponent of broad executive authority, telling the AP in a 2020 interview that he had told Trump administration officials multiple times that a Supreme Court ruling which rejected Trump’s effort to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, opened the door to enormous new presidential power.

The conspiracy investigation is being conducted in Florida, but the scope is unclear, as is whether any criminal charges will be brought.

Prosecutors have centered at least part of the probe on the long-concluded investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Investigators have issued a broad swath of subpoenas for records and conducted interviews related to the creation of an intelligence community assessment, released in January 2017, that found that Russia engaged in wide-ranging election interference to boost Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

A 2019 report by special counsel Robert Mueller affirmed that Russia interfered on Trump’s behalf and that the Trump campaign repeatedly welcomed the assistance, but it did not find sufficient evidence to establish a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign.

Several subsequent investigations into the Russia probe have identified multiple errors into how it was conducted, and a former FBI lawyer pleaded guilty in 2020 to doctoring an email during the course of the inquiry. But none of the reviews have identified criminal misconduct by any senior law enforcement or intelligence official involved in the investigation.

Trump has nonetheless continued to demand retribution and has sought to punish top officials from that time at the FBI and CIA.

Asked in a Fox News Channel interview in May what the Justice Department had done to address claims of a long-running conspiracy to bring down Trump, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “That’s exactly what we’re investigating right now.”

Yoo’s involvement in the investigation was earlier reported by Politico and CNN.

(SRN NEWS) – The High Court has rejected a Trump administration challenge, the Court says states CAN count late-arriving mail-in ballots: 

The Supreme Court ruling 5-4 that the State of Mississippi can count late ballots that arrive after Election Day. Justices ruling the ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day and show up within 5 business days. 

The decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

In just over half those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.

The court heard arguments in March in a case from Mississippi pitting the state against Trump’s Republican administration and the Republican and Libertarian parties. At issue was whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.

June 29 (Reuters) – The Nasdaq and the NYSE will ring the opening bell from the Oval Office for the first time together to launch Trump’s much-touted government-backed investment program for children next week, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Monday.

“We’re having a big opening bell ceremony next week. They’re doing that to celebrate the accounts to make sure everybody knows it’s time to get an account for your kid, even if it’s not born this year,” Hassett told CNBC in an interview.

U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this year unveiled Trump Accounts, a new tax-deferred investment vehicle for U.S. citizens under 18, which is scheduled to be officially launched on July 4.

Under the scheme, the U.S. Treasury will deposit $1,000 as seed money into an investment account for each child with a valid Social Security number born between 2025 and 2028.

The Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

(Reporting by Arasu Kannagi Basil in Bengaluru and Hyunsu Yim in Barcelona; Editing by Pooja Desai)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can count ballots that arrive after Election Day, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.

The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.

In just over half those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the court’s majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices.

Federal laws setting a single Election Day “leave open when those votes must be received,” Barrett wrote.

Congress could change the law, she said. “If varied deadlines for ballot receipt similarly call for a national solution, the American people must choose it through their elected representatives,” Barrett wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent for four justices. “Not only is today’s decision inconsistent with statutory text, legal context, historical practice, and precedent; it also threatens to produce lamentable consequences,” Alito wrote. “The majority’s holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans’ confidence in election integrity.”

The legal challenge was part of Trump’s broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 resulted from fraud even though more than 60 court decisions and his own attorney general said that argument had no merit.

Trump called the court ruling a “tremendous loss” and renewed his call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which has made it through the House of Representatives but not the Senate.

“There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Among other changes, the legislation would limit who is able to receive a mail ballot and impose a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement for registering to vote.

“If we want fair and secure elections, Election Day should mean exactly what it says, which is why this decision makes it even more imperative that Congress pass the SAVE America Act,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement.

The court heard arguments in March in a case from Mississippi pitting the state against Trump’s Republican administration and the Republican and Libertarian parties. At issue was whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.

The outcome is a “sigh of relief” for a lot of election administrators, said Stephen Richer, a Republican and the former top election administrator in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

A ruling in favor of the Republican National Committee “would have created a whole host of administrative challenges for the affected states,” said Richer, who is now a legal fellow at the Cato Institute.

RNC officials did not immediately respond Monday to email and telephone requests for comment.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court refused Monday to revive a $300 million defamation lawsuit filed against CNN over its coverage of a prominent attorney’s remarks made while defending President Donald Trump during his 2020 impeachment.

The majority declined to take up the case in a brief, unexplained order. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented, calling on the court to reconsider the legal standards for public figures who claim defamation.

Alan Dershowitz said the news network aired only a portion of the comment made during his defense of the president, distorting his meaning to make him look like he’d “lost his mind,” according to court documents.

The network said that multiple outlets had interpreted his remarks in a similar way, and Dershowitz couldn’t show CNN was trying to mischaracterize what he said.

In his appeal, Dershowitz had urged the court to reconsider New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The landmark First Amendment case that made it harder for public figures to win libel lawsuits because it requires proof that an outlet knowingly published something false, or showed a reckless disregard for the truth.

Dershowitz, a retired Harvard Law School professor and legal commentator, was part of Trump’s defense team during his impeachment trial over allegations that Trump wanted political favors from Ukraine in return for U.S. military aid. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.

Dershowitz responded to a question at one point by saying, “the only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were somehow illegal.” Providing arms to Ukraine, he said, isn’t illegal.

He alleged that CNN only played what he said moments later: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly, they are right, your election is in the public interest, and if the president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Dershowitz said the edit made it seem like he was arguing a president could avoid impeachment for illegal acts as long as he was doing it to get reelected – a concept his original suit called “preposterous and foolish on its face.”

CNN countered by saying it did air his full remarks during its live coverage, and invited him on twice more to expand on his meaning.

Lower courts tossed out the suit, finding that Dershowitz hadn’t shown CNN acted with “actual malice” in its reporting, making it fall short of the standard set by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday it will consider a Republican push to enforce strict Arizona voting laws passed in the swing state after the 2020 election.

The high court has allowed some similar rules to take effect as lawsuits play out, including Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for state and local elections and a Virginia purge of voter rolls that the state said was aimed at keeping noncitizens from voting.

The appeal was filed by the Republican National Committee after lower courts found the measures violated federal voting laws, and it was joined by GOP President Donald Trump’s administration.

“The RNC is proud to lead this effort, and we will keep fighting nationwide to defend election integrity and ensure only eligible citizens cast a ballot,” said Chairman Joe Gruters.

The high court is expected to hear arguments in the fall and likely hand down an opinion after the midterm elections.

The Republican-controlled legislature passed the laws in 2022, part of a wave of similar proposals around the country after Trump falsely claimed widespread voter fraud was responsible for his narrow defeat there to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump reclaimed the state in 2024, helping secure his return to the White House.

One measure requires people to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote using a state form. Another calls for regular purges of the voter rolls to remove people if their citizenship could not be confirmed, including within 90 days of an election.

The case reached the Supreme Court’s emergency docket in 2024. The justices gave the GOP a partial victory, allowing Arizona to require proof of citizenship for registration in state and local elections but not federal races.

Also that year, the high court allowed Virginia to continue a purge of voter rolls shortly before the election.

Citizenship is required to vote across the country, and people must attest they are citizens under penalty of perjury to register. Arizona is among only a handful of states that require additional proof, like a driver’s license or passport. Data indicates that voting by noncitizens is rare.

Arizona tried to impose proof requirements for national elections in 2013, but the law was struck down by the Supreme Court. Now, people can register as “federal only” voters without providing proof of citizenship, but Arizona requires additional proof for state and local election participation.

Just over 19,000 people were registered as active federal-only voters in 2023.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court is set to issue the final rulings of its nine-month term on Tuesday, including cases involving President Donald Trump’s bid to limit birthright citizenship, a Republican challenge to campaign finance limits and a dispute involving a crackdown by states on transgender athletes.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)

By Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Monday to let Donald Trump fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook as it stood firm to preserve the central bank’s cherished independence against an unprecedented challenge by the Republican president.

The court, in a 5-4 ruling, blocked Trump from removing Cook for now, providing a safeguard for the Fed specifically, even as it boosted the president’s power over government in a separate landmark ruling on Monday. In that ruling, involving Trump’s dismissal of a Federal Trade Commission member, the court expanded presidential authority to fire leaders of other U.S. agencies, overturning a precedent dating to 1935 in the process.

No other president since the central bank’s founding in 1913 had sought to oust a Fed governor. In his second term as president, Trump has tested the limits of presidential power in numerous other ways as well.

UNPROVEN ALLEGATIONS

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the ruling, said Trump had “failed to afford Cook the procedural protections to which she was entitled by statute. Without such protections, she could not properly dispute the charges the president laid against her.”

Trump last August cited unproven mortgage fraud allegations in trying to oust Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor. Cook denied the allegations, calling them a pretext to remove her for monetary policy differences.

Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices in the ruling. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented. 

The ruling definitively protects Fed officials from being fired at will by a president. Canvassing the history of the Federal Reserve System and its predecessor central banks since the founding, including the Bank of North America and the First and Second Banks of the United States, Roberts emphasized that all have featured independence from the president to shield monetary policy from political interference.

“Like the directors of its three predecessors, however, the Federal Reserve’s Governors do not serve at the president’s pleasure — they instead serve staggered 14-year terms, and may be removed only ‘for cause,'” Roberts said. 

“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” Roberts added. 

‘I REFUSED TO BOW’

Cook welcomed the court’s decision, saying it affirms the Fed’s obligation to make policy decisions independently, free from political interference. 

“This was never about mortgage documents signed years before I became a Federal Reserve governor. It was an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure and continued to set interest rates based only on what would best serve the American people,” Cook said.

The court said its ruling was not deciding the validity of the factual dispute in the case, which can now return to lower courts where action has been stalled while the Supreme Court weighed in. 

“It at least remains an open question what precisely happened here, and indeed whether Cook committed ‘gross negligence,’ let alone ‘deceitful and potentially criminal conduct,’ as the president’s letter alleges,” Roberts wrote, adding that Cook must be able to respond to the charges made against her. 

‘APPROPRIATE ACTION’

Trump reacted to the decision in a social media post.

“The Cook Lawsuit, having to do with her suitability in sitting on the Board of the Federal Reserve, was sent back by the Supreme Court on a strictly procedural basis, we will take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!” Trump wrote.

Trump’s targeting of Cook and ‌a separate criminal investigation his administration launched in January, but later dropped, against then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell together represented the biggest challenge to the central bank’s independence since its founding. 

In its separate 6-3 ruling powered by the conservative justices, the Supreme Court backed Trump’s firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. Trump called that ruling “one of the most important ever given with respect to Presidential Powers.”

The court overturned its pivotal decision in a case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that rebuffed Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to fire an FTC member over policy differences.

Monday’s rulings follow the court’s February 20 decision in another case with major economic ramifications to strike down most of Trump’s sweeping global tariffs.

THE POWER OF THE FED

The Fed is the world’s most important central bank, an institution that determines the cost of credit for the United States and beyond and which has been in Trump’s crosshairs since his return to the presidency in January 2025. 

As a Fed governor, Cook helps set U.S. monetary policy with the rest of the central bank’s seven-member board and the heads of the 12 regional Fed banks. Cook’s term in the job was due to run until 2038. She was appointed by Democratic former President Joe Biden in 2022.

May 15 was the final day of Powell’s eight years as Fed chair, though he remains a member of its Board of Governors. The U.S. Senate on May 13 voted to confirm Trump’s nominee Kevin Warsh as Powell’s successor, and he was sworn in on May 22.

When the justices in October agreed to hear the case involving Cook, they left her in the post for the time being. In contrast, they let Trump remove Slaughter last year. 

THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT

In creating the Fed in 1913, Congress passed a law called the Federal Reserve Act that included provisions to shield the central bank from political interference, requiring governors to be removed by a president only “for cause,” though the law did not define the term nor establish procedures for removal.

While Monday’s ruling did not define exactly what could constitute the “cause” under which a president could fire Cook or other board members, Roberts said that the Fed’s history and independence suggested it should be a “substantial threshold.”

“Without such constraints in place, any perceived or alleged misstep (past or present) could provide a ready pretext for a governor’s removal — a fact that he would surely know, and that would surely weigh on him as he decided what to say and how to vote,” Roberts wrote. “Nothing could be more corrosive of the independence that Congress sought to preserve.” 

Trump sought to fire Cook on August 25, 2025, by posting a termination letter on social media citing the allegations disclosed by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee, involving homes owned by her in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Atlanta. Trump this month appointed Pulte as acting director of national intelligence.

Pulte wrote on social media on Monday, “As I have repeatedly said, I believe Lisa Cook will be indicted for mortgage fraud.”

In what is called a criminal referral, Pulte asked the Justice Department last year to open a criminal investigation into Cook and others over alleged mortgage fraud. There has been no indication of any such criminal investigation moving forward.

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb in September ruled that Trump’s attempt to remove Cook without notice or a hearing likely violated her right to due process under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. The judge also said the allegations made against Cook likely were not a legally sufficient cause to remove her under the Federal Reserve Act as they relate to conduct that occurred before she served in the post. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined Trump’s request to put Cobb’s order on hold. 

Thomas, in a dissenting opinion, said the president can remove Cook “for any reason he wants and by any procedure he wants.” Thomas said any statute that hinders such power is unconstitutional. 

Barrett faulted the ruling for “settling” the question of whether the Federal Reserve Act’s removal restriction is constitutional based on a “conclusory analogy” to predecessor central banks. Alito and Gorsuch criticized the ruling’s scope. 

PUSHING THE LIMITS

Trump has heaped pressure on the central bank to cut interest rates more rapidly and more deeply than it has been willing to do as it combats persistent inflation, and lashed out repeatedly at Powell for not complying with his wishes. 

Both Cook’s case and the fight over tariffs involved the legal fallout from Trump aggressively pushing the limits of presidential power since returning to office in January 2025. 

Trump has also used executive authority to quickly transform policies on immigration, military service, federal employment and beyond. To date, the Supreme Court has allowed most of those policies to go ahead despite legal challenges, on a preliminary basis, though the tariffs decision was a major exception.

Trump reacted furiously to that ruling, saying he was “absolutely ashamed” of some of the justices and called the court’s Republican appointees — including two of his own — who ruled against him “fools” and “lapdogs” for Democrats.

THE POWELL INVESTIGATION

Like Cook, Powell called the administration’s action against him — an investigation involving cost overruns in a project to renovate two historical buildings at the Fed’s Washington headquarters — a pretext aimed at gaining influence over monetary policy. A judge on March 13 blocked subpoenas issued in the Powell investigation by a prosecutor appointed by Trump, agreeing with Powell that the probe was an improper attempt to intimidate the central bank into cutting interest rates. The prosecutor dropped the investigation on April 24.

Trump in January nominated Warsh, who previously served on the Fed’s Board of Governors and whose father-in-law is wealthy Trump booster Ron Lauder.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by John Kruzel, Nate Raymond, Katharine Jackson, Daphne Psaledakis and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Will Dunham)