President Donald Trump has dramatically escalated his confrontation with the Federal Reserve. His Justice Department is investigating and threatening a criminal indictment of the independent central bank and serving it with subpoenas. The dispute is ostensibly about Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s testimony to Congress over the cost of a massive renovation of Fed buildings in June. But in a statement Sunday, Powell, abandoning his previous attempt to ignore Trump’s relentless criticism, called the administration’s threat of criminal charges “pretexts’’ in the president’s campaign to seize control of U.S. interest rate policy from the Fed’s technocrats. Here's a look at the renovations and the controversy surrounding them.
