
The US Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's attempt to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, while standing firm to preserve the central bank's prized independence against an unprecedented challenge from the Republican president.
The court, in a 5-4 decision, blocked Trump's attempt to become the first president to fire a Federal Reserve official since Congress created the central bank in 1913. In his second term as president, Trump has tested the limits of presidential power in many other ways.
The ruling follows a February 20 ruling by judges in another case with major economic consequences to strike down most of Trump's sweeping global tariffs, a decision that prompted a harsh condemnation of the court by the president.
Trump last August cited unsubstantiated allegations of mortgage fraud in his attempt to fire Cook, the first black woman to serve as governor of the Federal Reserve, while she called it a pretext to fire him over differences on monetary policy.
The judges rejected a request by Trump's Justice Department to lift a judge's order barring it from immediately firing Cook, as her legal challenge to the firing continues to unfold. Cook has denied Trump's allegations.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump's request to overturn a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll in a case in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse of the former magazine columnist.
The judges rejected Trump's appeal after a lower court upheld the 2023 jury verdict and rejected Trump's arguments that the trial was unfair because the judge impermissibly allowed jurors to hear evidence about his alleged past sexual misconduct.
Trump has been confronting Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump raped her around 1996 in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store.
Trump denied Carroll's claims and claimed she lied about the allegations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 when he was not in office.