The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has given up on pursuing a criminal prosecution of former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, as Alternet reported on Friday. The decision closes out the Justice Department front of a confrontation between the White House and the US central bank that has been running since April.

"We're not reopening a criminal investigation into him," Blanche said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg.

Earlier this week, Blanche addressed a report issued by the Fed's Office of Inspector General that found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Powell in connection with cost overruns on the central bank's building renovation project, a $2.4 billion endeavor. While the report identified a series of missteps that aggravated renovation costs, it did not find malice.

Blanche said he was satisfied with the report but maintained that Powell had failed to oversee the project appropriately. According to Axios, Blanche said Powell "did not act appropriately as far as oversight," while distinguishing those failures from potential criminal conduct.

"Making mistakes and not having any sort of oversight over the folks doing billion-dollar projects isn't necessarily a crime," Blanche said.

The decision runs counter to Trump's apparent eagerness to target Powell, who has publicly corrected the president in front of live cameras. On Wednesday, just hours after the Fed inspector general's report exonerated Powell of criminality, Trump demanded that he resign from his post or face legal action.

"If he doesn't resign, he should be sued, at the highest level, by the United States Government, for either corruption or incompetence, both of which are completely unacceptable," Trump said.

Powell's term as chair expired in May, according to Axios, but he took the unusual step of staying on as a governor, saying he would not leave until the criminal investigation was "well and truly over, with transparency and finality." He later updated his reasoning, saying the administration's broader legal actions against the Fed had left him "no choice but to stay." With the criminal inquiry no longer active, those broader legal actions — and Powell's continued presence on the Fed's board — remain the unresolved threads in the standoff.

A Fed spokesperson declined to comment when questioned by Axios.

The clash began in April, when Trump was furious with Powell for refusing to lower interest rates as much as the president wanted. Prominent economists, including Paul Krman, sided with Powell, stressing that for the Fed, interest rate cuts are a tool to be saved for major economic downturns. The public feud also put a rare spotlight on the Federal Reserve's independence, which insulates monetary policy decisions from direct White House control. Trump nonetheless called for Powell to be fired before his term as Fed chair ended on May 15.

Even then, the Justice Department had been investigating claims that Powell lied to Congress — allegations Trump's critics described as baseless, despite biting critiques from conservatives who called the DOJ's Powell probe petty and devoid of merit.

"The Trump Administration's self-destructive investigation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has achieved a new level of farce," National Review journalist Andrew C. McCarthy wrote in April.