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Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about which calamity this country and many others are going through this week.

I am your host, Mia Wong.

And today, we're going to be talking about the Federal Reserve.

Now, those of you who have listened to Executive Disorder are aware that a bit over a week ago,

as this episode is being released,

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome H. Powell released what, again, I can really only describe

as someone escaping from a kidnapping and releasing a video about it,

in which he discussed a Justice Department grand jury subpoena

and a threat to indict him over cost overruns on a new Federal Reserve building.

Now, Jerome Powell has claimed that these charges are really about removing him and about eliminating

the independence of the Federal Reserve.

He also claims that he was directly threatened with these charges, unless he was willing to adjust federal reserve policy to fall in line with the Trump administration.

And this is an astonishing video for a number of reasons. One is that it's in a lot of ways one of the most direct

points of defiance that a government official has taken directly to the president. It's also

astonishing because it is actually technically the second time that Trump has tried to do something

like this to a member of the Federal Reserve Board because as you're listening to this,

the Supreme Court has been hearing arguments about Trump's attempt to fire one of the other members of the Federal Reserve Board, a woman

named Lisa Cook. Now, obviously, I don't know yet what the outcome of that deliberation is going

to be. It seems right now that the Supreme Court is uncompeled with Trump's ability to fire a Federal Reserve

board member over really truly very trumped-up charges about mortgage fraud. I'm going to quote

...