Just how bad was DOJ under Trump and Bill Barr? Former New York prosecutor tells all

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Just how bad was DOJ under Trump and Bill Barr? Former New York prosecutor tells all
Former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman dishes dirt on Trump regime: Bill Barr was a henchman, not a hero

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 14, 2022 9:29AM (EDT)


(Salon) In June of 2020, the country was still in the throes of the COVID pandemic, and dealing with the prospect of a wild presidential campaign being waged in the middle of it. We were all glued to the TV watching doctors explain what happens when you go on a ventilator and looking at graphs that showed skyrocketing cases and death rates. There were a lot of important stories in that strange time that sort of passed under the radar. One of them was Attorney General Bill Barr's firing of Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Now Berman has written a book about his time working under the Trump administration, "Holding the Line," and it's fascinating. The corruption of the Department of Justice under Barr was worse than we thought.

As most readers likely know, the Southern District of New York amounts to a sort of super-office within the Justice Department because it handles most of the big white-collar crimes emerging from Wall Street and the financial industry, and many national security and organized crime cases.. For better or worse, it's known to operate with a great deal of independence from DOJ leadership in Washington. On a Friday night in late June of 2020, Barr released a statement saying that Berman was stepping down as U.S. attorney for the SDNY and would be replaced by Jay Clayton, then-chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who had no prosecutorial experience. Since that appointment must be confirmed by the Senate, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Craig Carpenito, would step in on a temporary basis.

All this came as a surprise to nearly everyone involved — but no one as much as Berman himself, who had absolutely not resigned. He issued this statement of clarification:

Link to tweet

....(snip)....

There was a lot of speculation at the time about why Barr wanted Berman out. His office had pursued a number of cases involving Trump associates and Trump himself, including the prosecution of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and of two associates of Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, which led to investigations of Giuliani himself. Berman had also investigated Trump's endlessly corrupt inaugural committee along with a number of Trump-connected people involved with the Turkish state bank. Trump had been purging the DOJ of people he felt to be disloyal for some time, starting with his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. He'd also fired Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who preceded Sessions, FBI Director James Comey and then Acting Director Andrew McCabe, as well as FBI general counsel Dana Boente and a bunch of inspectors general. It wasn't mysterious why Barr believed Berman had to go. Trump had been complaining that the New York office was "filled with Democrats out to get him" and Barr (at that point) was eager to serve as his hatchet man.

Berman's book pretty much confirms all that speculation and more. He refreshingly names names and declines to canonize those who only had their "come to Jesus" moment after Trump lost the election, especially Barr but other Jan. 6 committee witnesses as well, such as former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/14/just-how-was-doj-under-and-bill-barr-former-new-york-prosecutor-tells-all/