White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss details of the criminal probe into Fed Chair Powell, impact on future Fed independence, state of the economy, strength of the labor market, and more.
Questions asked in this interview
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0:18Kevin, do you have any, what do you know exactly about the testimony that Jay Powell reportedly gave that would be considered perjury or perjurious in terms of that building?
1:58Are there deep-seated problems at the Fed in your view institutionally?
3:20But the president, I guess we take him on face value?
4:32Kevin, what do you think just about the perception around the rule of law?
6:26Do you consider 4.4% pretty close to full employment at this point?
7:56Do you have any viewpoint on that at all that you can share with us?
Joining us now, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. Thanks for being with us this morning. Mr. Director, if I call you Kevin, you could be. I mean, there's more than one Kevin. There's a Warsh, there's a H. You know, you're one of the two Kevins now. Kevin Hassett.
There's plenty of Kevin. We want to talk about the employment report, all kinds of stuff. But that was preempted, I think, our discussion by, as you can imagine, some of the developments that happened yesterday. Kevin, do you have any, what do you know exactly about the testimony that Jay Powell reportedly gave that would be considered perjury or perjurious in terms of that building?
I've not been involved in conversations with the Justice Department about that. I've not talked to the Justice Department ahead of them contacting Jay, and so I don't really have anything to add other than I respect the independence of the Fed and the independence of the Justice Department. We'll see how it goes.
Well, that's obviously the way that things look. Kevin, you can't definitively say that this threatens the independence of the Fed, but in terms of optics and what Jay Powell said, I'll just hang it on what the chairman said. He said this was nothing more than a pretext to force him or to put pressure on him to do the president's bidding on lowering rates.
Well, in the fullness of time, we'll find out whether it looks like a pretext, but right now we've got a building that has dramatic cost overruns and plans for the buildings that look inconsistent with the testimony. But again, I'm not a Justice Department person. I hope everything turns out okay for Jay.
Some of the prospective candidates to replace Chair Powell have been outspoken about problems within the Federal Reserve. Now there are some people that say they should have probably raised rates more quickly and taken away some of the punch bowl to keep inflation under control. But others say since then, and you would argue, I think, Kevin, that the economy is in good shape from a lot of different viewpoints. I don't know whether the Fed gets any credit, but at worst, at least they didn't stop some of these positive things from happening. Are there deep-seated problems at the Fed in your view institutionally?
I think that what I'd like to see at the Fed, regardless of who's Fed chair, is just a little bit more introspection. We let inflation get out of control. It'd be nice to know how that happened and nice to know that we have a plan to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that kind of stuff would be great for the world economy. But the bottom line is that the economy is booming right now because of Trump's policies, not because of the Fed. The Fed has amongst the highest interest rates on earth right now. And President Trump is frustrated with that. But I don't think that has anything to do with what was going on this weekend.
8 more exchanges in this transcript
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Hassett, K. (2026, January 12). Watch CNBC's full interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/635273/
MLA
Kevin Hassett. "Watch CNBC's full interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett." CNBC Television, 12 Jan. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/635273/.
BibTeX
@misc{hassett2026_635273,
author = {Kevin Hassett},
title = {Watch CNBC's full interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {jan},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/635273/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
