Washington
Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing way for Warsh
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has ended its probe into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of his successor, Kevin Warsh.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The decision ends an investigation, one of several undertaken by the Justice Department into President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries, that for months had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct.
A prosecutor handling the case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t yet found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
More recently, prosecutors made an unannounced visit to a construction site at the Fed’s headquarters but were turned away, drawing a rebuke from a defense attorney in the case who called the maneuver “not appropriate.”
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell, whose term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, has said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Warsh said Tuesday that he never promised the White House that he would cut interest rates, even as the president renewed his calls for the central bank to do so.
“The president never once asked me to commit to any particular interest rate decision, period,” Kevin Warsh, a former top Fed official, said under questioning by the Senate Banking Committee.
“Nor would I ever agree to do so if he had. ... I will be an independent actor if confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve.”
Warsh’s comments came just hours after Trump, in an interview on CNBC, was asked if he would be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates and responded, “I would.”
Georgia
Republican pleads not guilty to wire fraud charge in Ponzi scheme
ATLANTA (AP) — A prominent Georgia Republican accused of running a $156 million Ponzi scheme has been charged by federal prosecutors with wire fraud, pleading not guilty on Thursday.
The single count of wire fraud against Edwin Brant Frost IV is the first criminal charge to result from an investigation that began after First Liberty Building and Loan collapsed last June.
Frost waived indictment before pleading not guilty, a step that is typically a prelude to a later guilty plea in federal courts. He publicly apologized for his role earlier and is free on bail.
U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg told The Associated Press that Frost is “not going to contest the charges” and is likely to enter a guilty plea in early May. He said that federal prosecutors could consider charges against others, depending on evidence.
The charge carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but any recommended sentence would be heavily dependent on the amount of money that a court determines was stolen.
Although $156 million is the amount of money taken in by First Liberty, according to a receiver, the amount lost is lower, at least $65 million, because some investors were repaid.
Hertzberg said prosecutors intend to recommend a sentence close to the top of the 20-year range for Frost, a 68-year-old Newnan man.
“The loss here is very significant,” he said.
First Liberty said it was in the business of taking investor funds and making short-term, high-interest loans to businesses, paying investors up to 18% annual interest. While First Liberty did make loans to businesses, prosecutors allege Frost used new investors’ money to pay previous investors, the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Prosecutors also claim Frost skimmed more than $5 million of investors’ money to finance his own lifestyle. That includes spending more than $140,000 on jewelry and more than $230,000 to rent a vacation home over multiple years in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the family of late president George H. W. Bush famously spent summers. Prosecutors say Frost also spent more than $2 million on credit card bills.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit last year against the company and Frost. Some investors had complained that criminal charges had been slow to materialize, but Hertzberg said his office has been building a case, and that because Frost is willing to plead guilty, punishment will come quickly now.
“We were operating in the background, and we’ve now come out of the shadows to ensure that Mr. Frost faces full consequences for his actions,” Hertzberg said, praising investigations by the SEC and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Among those who lost money were a company run by former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer; Alabama state Auditor Andrew Sorrell; and a political action committee controlled by the Republican Sorrell. Party activists have said many grassroots Republicans also lost money, while others were lured by ads on shows hosted by conservatives including Erick Erickson, Hugh Hewitt and Charlie Kirk.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office has levied $500,000 civil fines against three people his office says helped solicit money for First Liberty and asked state prosecutors to consider criminal charges against them.
A federal judge appointed a receiver who is also trying to get money back for investors. The receiver had $5.16 million in cash as of March 23, and was trying to recoup money from nearly 30 unpaid loans by First Liberty.
Vermont
Prosecutor declines to charge six protesters arrested at South Burlington ICE raid
The Chittenden County state’s attorney said Wednesday she will not charge six protesters arrested during a federal immigration raid in South Burlington last month, a decision that state police leaders condemned.
State’s Attorney Sarah George said in a statement that in making her decision, she analyzed the cases to find where the harm was and who contributed to it. “I see the purpose of prosecution to be, in part, to heal harm caused by the person being charged,” she added.
Police and protesters clashed during a daylong U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a Dorset Street house on March 11. ICE detained three people inside the house, whom federal judges have since released. The enforcement action was later found to have been triggered by a case of mistaken identity.
By the end of the standoff, six protesters were arrested — three by Vermont State Police and three by Burlington police — amid heightened tension on both sides in what was the first major enforcement action in Vermont during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In making the arrests, police cited offenses including disorderly conduct and assault on a law enforcement officer.
George said in the statement that she is confident that some protesters acted in ways that went “beyond civil disobedience into unacceptable and perhaps criminal behavior,” including the three people cited by Burlington police. She said she is also confident that there were some law enforcement officials “who agitated, who escalated, and who responded in a way that may be ultimately deemed legal, but was also unacceptable.”
“So to charge these six individuals with no criminal records, and expect that they bear the burden of all the harm caused that day — is not something I was interested in our office being a part of,” she wrote.
Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison and Vermont State Police Director Col. Matthew T. Birmingham said they took offense at the suggestion that state and local law enforcement bear equal responsibility with the protesters for criminal behavior on Dorset Street. They condemned George’s action as “a disheartening decision that sets a dangerous precedent.”
“Lawbreakers in Chittenden County already seemed to know they can act with impunity,” the state law enforcement leaders said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“The state’s attorney’s failure to bring charges in this matter is likely to embolden people at similar events in the future to cross the line into criminal behavior, placing the public and law enforcement at greater risk of harm,” the statement reads.
George pushed back against any narrative broadly casting the protesters as agitators and law enforcement as protectors as “all too familiar” and cited the civil rights movement.
“There was a time when Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer — were all considered agitators, were arrested, some prosecuted, and painted as enemies of the State and criminals for standing up for civil rights in a way that was unpopular,” George said in the statement. “We must do better here.”
The Burlington Police Department acknowledged the harm the ICE incident has had on the community but also called for the rule of law to be upheld.
“Engaging in physical confrontations with law enforcement in the street is not protected speech or expressive conduct under the First Amendment,” said interim Police Chief Shawn Burke in an email Wednesday.
George referred the three Burlington cases to the Burlington Community Justice Center, which employs alternative restorative justice practices to handle precharge referrals instead of sending them to the court system. Burke said the Burlington Police Department will not participate in the restorative process, as is typical.
George also called for an independent review of the law enforcement response during the ICE raid. Immigration and social justice advocates allege that police actions that day violated the state’s policy on fair and impartial policing. State and South Burlington police insist they did not. The Burlington police are completing their review.
Public testimony at the Statehouse and before the Burlington City Council included multiple accounts of protesters’ being choked, pepper-sprayed and dragged by state and local police at the raid last month.
“We cannot in good faith present findings from an investigation about whether law enforcement violated any laws when those investigations were done by the law enforcement agencies whose conduct is being questioned,” George said in the statement.
Morrison and Birmingham took issue with her call for an independent assessment of law enforcement actions. “To impugn the ability of the police to conduct fair, thorough investigations directly undermines all the cases in the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office, which relies on the investigative work of police departments each day to support every case the office is prosecuting,” they said in the statement.
Earlier this year, George chose not to charge a group of elderly residents who were cited by Vermont State Police for criminal trespass on Feb. 9 during a peaceful civil disobedience action in the lobby of a Williston business park that houses a major ICE surveillance center.
George is seeking her third full term in the 2026 election. She was first appointed to the position by Gov. Phil Scott in 2017. George has faced criticism for reducing cash bail, not pursuing certain traffic stop charges and expanding restorative justice — moves that her critics say are too soft on crime and that her advocates applaud as being humane.
Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing way for Warsh
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has ended its probe into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of his successor, Kevin Warsh.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The decision ends an investigation, one of several undertaken by the Justice Department into President Donald Trump’s perceived adversaries, that for months had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct.
A prosecutor handling the case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t yet found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
More recently, prosecutors made an unannounced visit to a construction site at the Fed’s headquarters but were turned away, drawing a rebuke from a defense attorney in the case who called the maneuver “not appropriate.”
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell, whose term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, has said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Warsh said Tuesday that he never promised the White House that he would cut interest rates, even as the president renewed his calls for the central bank to do so.
“The president never once asked me to commit to any particular interest rate decision, period,” Kevin Warsh, a former top Fed official, said under questioning by the Senate Banking Committee.
“Nor would I ever agree to do so if he had. ... I will be an independent actor if confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve.”
Warsh’s comments came just hours after Trump, in an interview on CNBC, was asked if he would be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates and responded, “I would.”
Georgia
Republican pleads not guilty to wire fraud charge in Ponzi scheme
ATLANTA (AP) — A prominent Georgia Republican accused of running a $156 million Ponzi scheme has been charged by federal prosecutors with wire fraud, pleading not guilty on Thursday.
The single count of wire fraud against Edwin Brant Frost IV is the first criminal charge to result from an investigation that began after First Liberty Building and Loan collapsed last June.
Frost waived indictment before pleading not guilty, a step that is typically a prelude to a later guilty plea in federal courts. He publicly apologized for his role earlier and is free on bail.
U.S. Attorney Theodore Hertzberg told The Associated Press that Frost is “not going to contest the charges” and is likely to enter a guilty plea in early May. He said that federal prosecutors could consider charges against others, depending on evidence.
The charge carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, but any recommended sentence would be heavily dependent on the amount of money that a court determines was stolen.
Although $156 million is the amount of money taken in by First Liberty, according to a receiver, the amount lost is lower, at least $65 million, because some investors were repaid.
Hertzberg said prosecutors intend to recommend a sentence close to the top of the 20-year range for Frost, a 68-year-old Newnan man.
“The loss here is very significant,” he said.
First Liberty said it was in the business of taking investor funds and making short-term, high-interest loans to businesses, paying investors up to 18% annual interest. While First Liberty did make loans to businesses, prosecutors allege Frost used new investors’ money to pay previous investors, the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Prosecutors also claim Frost skimmed more than $5 million of investors’ money to finance his own lifestyle. That includes spending more than $140,000 on jewelry and more than $230,000 to rent a vacation home over multiple years in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the family of late president George H. W. Bush famously spent summers. Prosecutors say Frost also spent more than $2 million on credit card bills.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit last year against the company and Frost. Some investors had complained that criminal charges had been slow to materialize, but Hertzberg said his office has been building a case, and that because Frost is willing to plead guilty, punishment will come quickly now.
“We were operating in the background, and we’ve now come out of the shadows to ensure that Mr. Frost faces full consequences for his actions,” Hertzberg said, praising investigations by the SEC and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Among those who lost money were a company run by former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer; Alabama state Auditor Andrew Sorrell; and a political action committee controlled by the Republican Sorrell. Party activists have said many grassroots Republicans also lost money, while others were lured by ads on shows hosted by conservatives including Erick Erickson, Hugh Hewitt and Charlie Kirk.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office has levied $500,000 civil fines against three people his office says helped solicit money for First Liberty and asked state prosecutors to consider criminal charges against them.
A federal judge appointed a receiver who is also trying to get money back for investors. The receiver had $5.16 million in cash as of March 23, and was trying to recoup money from nearly 30 unpaid loans by First Liberty.
Vermont
Prosecutor declines to charge six protesters arrested at South Burlington ICE raid
The Chittenden County state’s attorney said Wednesday she will not charge six protesters arrested during a federal immigration raid in South Burlington last month, a decision that state police leaders condemned.
State’s Attorney Sarah George said in a statement that in making her decision, she analyzed the cases to find where the harm was and who contributed to it. “I see the purpose of prosecution to be, in part, to heal harm caused by the person being charged,” she added.
Police and protesters clashed during a daylong U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a Dorset Street house on March 11. ICE detained three people inside the house, whom federal judges have since released. The enforcement action was later found to have been triggered by a case of mistaken identity.
By the end of the standoff, six protesters were arrested — three by Vermont State Police and three by Burlington police — amid heightened tension on both sides in what was the first major enforcement action in Vermont during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In making the arrests, police cited offenses including disorderly conduct and assault on a law enforcement officer.
George said in the statement that she is confident that some protesters acted in ways that went “beyond civil disobedience into unacceptable and perhaps criminal behavior,” including the three people cited by Burlington police. She said she is also confident that there were some law enforcement officials “who agitated, who escalated, and who responded in a way that may be ultimately deemed legal, but was also unacceptable.”
“So to charge these six individuals with no criminal records, and expect that they bear the burden of all the harm caused that day — is not something I was interested in our office being a part of,” she wrote.
Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison and Vermont State Police Director Col. Matthew T. Birmingham said they took offense at the suggestion that state and local law enforcement bear equal responsibility with the protesters for criminal behavior on Dorset Street. They condemned George’s action as “a disheartening decision that sets a dangerous precedent.”
“Lawbreakers in Chittenden County already seemed to know they can act with impunity,” the state law enforcement leaders said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
“The state’s attorney’s failure to bring charges in this matter is likely to embolden people at similar events in the future to cross the line into criminal behavior, placing the public and law enforcement at greater risk of harm,” the statement reads.
George pushed back against any narrative broadly casting the protesters as agitators and law enforcement as protectors as “all too familiar” and cited the civil rights movement.
“There was a time when Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, John Lewis, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer — were all considered agitators, were arrested, some prosecuted, and painted as enemies of the State and criminals for standing up for civil rights in a way that was unpopular,” George said in the statement. “We must do better here.”
The Burlington Police Department acknowledged the harm the ICE incident has had on the community but also called for the rule of law to be upheld.
“Engaging in physical confrontations with law enforcement in the street is not protected speech or expressive conduct under the First Amendment,” said interim Police Chief Shawn Burke in an email Wednesday.
George referred the three Burlington cases to the Burlington Community Justice Center, which employs alternative restorative justice practices to handle precharge referrals instead of sending them to the court system. Burke said the Burlington Police Department will not participate in the restorative process, as is typical.
George also called for an independent review of the law enforcement response during the ICE raid. Immigration and social justice advocates allege that police actions that day violated the state’s policy on fair and impartial policing. State and South Burlington police insist they did not. The Burlington police are completing their review.
Public testimony at the Statehouse and before the Burlington City Council included multiple accounts of protesters’ being choked, pepper-sprayed and dragged by state and local police at the raid last month.
“We cannot in good faith present findings from an investigation about whether law enforcement violated any laws when those investigations were done by the law enforcement agencies whose conduct is being questioned,” George said in the statement.
Morrison and Birmingham took issue with her call for an independent assessment of law enforcement actions. “To impugn the ability of the police to conduct fair, thorough investigations directly undermines all the cases in the Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office, which relies on the investigative work of police departments each day to support every case the office is prosecuting,” they said in the statement.
Earlier this year, George chose not to charge a group of elderly residents who were cited by Vermont State Police for criminal trespass on Feb. 9 during a peaceful civil disobedience action in the lobby of a Williston business park that houses a major ICE surveillance center.
George is seeking her third full term in the 2026 election. She was first appointed to the position by Gov. Phil Scott in 2017. George has faced criticism for reducing cash bail, not pursuing certain traffic stop charges and expanding restorative justice — moves that her critics say are too soft on crime and that her advocates applaud as being humane.
