Above: Attorney General William Barr, flanked by Ed O’Callaghan (left) and Rod Rosenstein (right). | Bill O’Leary/Washington Post via Getty Images.
We already knew that William Barr was the most corrupt Attorney General in the history of the US. But his politicization of the Department of Justice to weaponize it into Donald Trump’s personal law firm for protecting Trump and prosecuting his political enemies extended to his chief deputies, and other US attorneys. It is a level of corruption that far exceeds that of Attorney General John Mitchell during Watergate, for which he was prosecuted and went to prison.
Andrew Prokop at Vox reports, A new book claims Trump’s efforts to politicize the Justice Department were worse than we knew:
During the Trump administration, Geoffrey Berman was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) [aka the Sovereign District of New York] until he was abruptly fired in June 2020. It was widely viewed as one of many examples of Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr trying to politicize the Justice Department.
Now, Berman (right) has written a book giving his version of what happened behind the scenes. The New York Times’s Benjamin Weiser obtained a copy of that book, Holding the Line (which will be released on September 13), and in it, Berman reveals new details of how top Justice officials tried to steer the Department toward prosecutions Trump wanted — often seemingly acting in direct response to Trump’s tweets.
As president, Trump often publicly and privately said he wanted prosecutors to lay off his allies and go after his perceived political enemies — from top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and the Bidens, to his own former appointees like John Bolton, to former FBI officials like James Comey and Andrew McCabe.
These demands ran up against a Justice Department culture that prized independence from the White House on criminal matters. Trump’s demands for prosecutions were usually legally dubious if not utterly groundless, and even many of his own DOJ appointees were reluctant to pursue them. As I wrote in August 2020, there was effectively a dam preventing the president’s corrupt or political pressures from crashing through and flooding the DOJ — but, as Trump’s term stretched on, that dam began to spring more and more leaks.
Berman, in his telling, was part of the dam. And according to the Times, his book provides new details on how he faced private pressure to prosecute two Trump targets in particular: former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig. In both cases, Berman reveals a troubling pattern: Once he concluded no charges were merited, top Trump appointees working under the attorney general simply reassigned each case to another US Attorney’s office in the hope of a different outcome.
Trump allegedly concocted an investigation into John Kerry
Back in May 2018, the Boston Globe reported that Kerry, who left public office at the end of the Obama administration, had recently engaged in “some unusual shadow diplomacy with a top-ranking Iranian official” — specifically, he’d met Iran’s foreign minister to discuss Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which Trump was about to withdraw from.
Trump was furious about this report, tweeting on May 7 that this was “possibly illegal” for Kerry to do. Two days later, Berman claims that Justice Department officials assigned an investigation of Kerry to his US Attorney’s office, per the Times.
Trump wanted Kerry prosecuted under the Logan Act, which bans private citizens from conducting US foreign policy. The law was last used in 1852; some legal experts now view it as a “dead letter” and question its constitutionality.
However, when the FBI investigated Trump advisers’ links to Russia, they did research whether the Logan Act would apply to Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador before Trump took office — though they never came close to bringing charges related to it.
After another Trump tweet on the matter in April 2019, Berman writes that Justice Department officials called members of his team and peppered them with questions about the Kerry investigation’s speed. A few months later, after Berman told DOJ higher-ups that he wouldn’t pursue charges in the matter, he was informed that they would send the case to a different US Attorney’s office, in Maryland (which did not end up pursuing charges either).
Trump’s desire to prosecute Kerry under the Logan Act was already publicly known. John Bolton wrote in his memoir that Trump was “obsessed” with it, mentioning it “in meeting after meeting in the Oval” to Barr “or anybody listening.” But it was not known that the Department had actually investigated Kerry, or reassigned the case to a separate office.
Politics loomed over Greg Craig’s indictment
The case against Greg Craig — a White House Counsel in the Obama administration — did not originate in the mind of Donald Trump, but rather with special counsel Robert Mueller.
As part of his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Mueller had dug deep into work Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, had done for Ukraine’s pro-Russian political faction. Craig, as a partner at the law firm Skadden, had played a part in that work. (Manafort arranged a deal in which Craig’s firm would write a report assessing a controversial prosecution of a Ukrainian politician.)
Mueller’s team argued that Manafort didn’t properly register as a foreign agent, and they had similar questions about Craig and his firm, so they referred an investigation elsewhere in the Justice Department.
The case was sent to the Southern District of New York in March 2018, and Berman’s team proceeded to investigate it; Skadden would eventually make a settlement agreement with the DOJ. But the question remained about whether Craig should face criminal charges.
Per the Times, Berman writes in his book that he heard a presentation from Craig’s lawyers and concluded Craig was innocent. Shortly afterward, in September 2018, Ed O’Callaghan, a top Justice official, called Berman’s deputy at SDNY. Since SDNY had just criminally charged Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and a Republican congressman, Chris Collins, O’Callaghan allegedly wanted to “even things out” with charges against a Democrat before election day: Craig. (O’Callaghan denied to the Times that he had made such a statement.)
Berman eventually reported back that his office wouldn’t charge Craig. So Justice Department higher-ups looked for someone who would, and sent the case to the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia. That office later indicted Craig on one count of making false statements to DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, but he was acquitted at trial, and criticism swirled that the case was weak and politicized.
Berman’s revelations of these backroom pressures bolster those criticisms further. Notably, it’s not clear that Trump himself ever took a particular interest in Craig’s case, but by this account, one of his top officials wanted a Democrat charged and Craig fit the bill.
Dangers for a Trump second term
Despite Trump’s many efforts to bend the Justice Department to his whims, officials resisted many of his demands. None of his big targets — Clinton, Kerry, the Bidens, Comey, and McCabe — were prosecuted, and the Department largely did not assist him in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. [Hmmm, wkth the exception of Jefrey Clark, who almost became acting Attorney General as part of Trump’s Coup Plot.]
But if Trump should return to power after 2024, there’s no guarantee that resistance will continue. He would no longer need to constrain himself for reelection, and after January 6, he’s embittered against traditional Republican establishment forces he believes abandoned him.
So Trump and his team may well become more skilled at identifying and empowering true loyalists who really would act in Trump’s personal interests, defying law or tradition. Indeed, his recent legal peril will make that of paramount personal importance to him.
Furthermore, Trump allies have recently been floating a plan to purge many career government officials, including at the Justice Department and FBI, should he return to power, according to Axios’s Jonathan Swan. Trump has repeatedly argued that the Justice Department has been politicized against him, after four years of trying to politicize it against his enemies. So there’s every reason to expect he’d go much further in his second term — including to totally unprecedented places.
The publication of Geoffrey Berman’s book today, Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent Us Attorney’s Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department, has already resulted in a congressional investigation being scheduled.
The Guardian reports, Berman book prompts Senate panel to investigate Trump DoJ interference:
The US Senate judiciary committee has said it will investigate claims made in a recent book that allies of Donald Trump politically interfered with a prominent US attorney’s office.
William Barr, Donald Trump’s second attorney general, fired Geoffrey Berman from the powerful southern district of New York (SDNY) five months before the 2020 election. In a memoir – Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department – which is published in the US on Tuesday, Berman alleges interference both on behalf of Trump allies and against Trump enemies.
As reported by the New York Times and the Guardian last week, the book outlines numerous alleged instances. These include the Halkbank investigation into a Turkish bank’s operations in regard to Iran, and an ultimately stymied investigation of John Kerry, Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, for conversations with Iranian diplomats after leaving his post.
According to the New York Times, the No 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, announced the judiciary committee investigation in a Monday letter to Merrick Garland, the current attorney general. Garland acknowledged receipt of the letter, the paper said.
The Guardian has contacted Berman for comment. He told MSNBC that at the time of his firing, the SDNY “was working on a couple politically sensitive cases. One of those cases is the Steve Bannon We Build the Wall case”, in which Trump’s former White House strategist was ultimately charged with fraud.
“And we were very close to indicting that case around the time I got fired and Barr knew about the case.
“And that case was indicted by the SDNY by Audrey Strauss, who took over as acting US attorney after I was fired, and she brought that prosecution. And then President Trump pardoned Steve Bannon, which was an outrageous pardon. But … we were very close to indicting.”
Last week, Bannon was indicted on New York state charges. He pleaded not guilty.
Berman continued: “The other case was the Ukraine investigations arising out of the Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman indictments and that was something that we had been investigating for quite a while and then we continued to investigate for quite a while.”
Parnas and Fruman worked with Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor turned Trump attorney, to try to extract political dirt from the government of Ukraine – efforts which led to Trump’s first impeachment.
On MSNBC, Berman was asked why he saved his allegations for his book.
He said: “There are rules, laws and statutes and regulations that prohibit Department of Justice employees and former employees from talking about ongoing cases and investigations, as well as internal conversations relating to those cases. And we are bound by that.”
In July 2020, four months before election day, Berman testified in Congress.
He said: “When I gave congressional testimony … I went to the ethics office of the SDNY and the ethics office at Main Justice, and I said, ‘What can I talk about? Because there were ongoing investigations that were politically sensitive at the time I got fired. And Barr knew about them. And, you know, can I talk about it?’
“And the ruling that came down and I respected it, was that ‘You can’t talk about any ongoing investigations because they might be jeopardised. You can’t talk about any other cases that went on. You can’t even talk about the conversations that you had with other DoJ employees, except for the two days before you got fired. You can talk about Bill Barr.’”
That, he said, “was frustrating, because I couldn’t tell the whole story and the whole story needed to be told”.
The memoir, Berman said, was subjected to DoJ pre-publication review and “entirely vetted” to ensure he was behaving in “an ethical manner”. In it he calls Barr a bully, a thug and a liar.
Another example of a political investigation to retaliate against Trump’s enemies list: “Durham Inquiry Appears to Wind Down as Grand Jury Expires”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/us/politics/durham-inquiry-trump-russia.html
“When John H. Durham was assigned by the Justice Department in 2019 to examine the origins of the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, President Donald J. Trump and his supporters expressed a belief that the inquiry would prove that a “deep state” conspiracy including top Obama-era officials had worked to sabotage him.
Now Mr. Durham appears to be winding down his three-year inquiry without anything close to the results Mr. Trump was seeking. The grand jury that Mr. Durham has recently used to hear evidence has expired, and while he could convene another, there are currently no plans to do so, three people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Durham and his team are working to complete a final report by the end of the year, they said, and one of the lead prosecutors on his team is leaving for a job with a prominent law firm.
Over the course of his inquiry, Mr. Durham has developed cases against two people accused of lying to the F.B.I. in relation to outside efforts to investigate purported Trump-Russia ties, but he has not charged any conspiracy or put any high-level officials on trial. The recent developments suggest that the chances of any more indictments are remote.
After Mr. Durham’s team completes its report, it will be up to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to decide whether to make its findings public. The report will be Mr. Durham’s opportunity to present any evidence or conclusions that challenge the Justice Department’s basis for opening the investigation in 2016 into the links between Mr. Trump and Russia.”
The one trial Durham brought was a failure:
“Mr. Durham and his team used a grand jury in Washington to indict Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Mr. Sussmann was indicted last year on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I. at a meeting in which he shared a tip about potential connections between computers associated with Mr. Trump and a Kremlin-linked Russian bank.
Mr. Sussmann was acquitted of that charge at trial in May.
In another case, Mr. Durham’s team negotiated a plea deal with an F.B.I. lawyer whom an inspector general had accused of doctoring an email used in preparation for a wiretap renewal application. The plea deal resulted in no prison time.”
All the wasted government resources and time spent pursuing Trump’s retaliation against those who investigated him for his Russia ties has produced bupkis. This is all they have:
“A grand jury based in the Eastern District of Virginia last year indicted a Russia analyst who had worked with Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Mr. Trump. The dossier played no role in the F.B.I.’s decision to begin examining the ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. It was used in an application to obtain a warrant to surveil a Trump campaign associate.
The analyst, Igor Danchenko, who is accused of lying to federal investigators, goes on trial next month in Alexandria, Va.”
He stands a good chance of acquittal as well.
Max Boot writes at the Washigton Post, “New revelations show Biden was right: Trump does threaten democracy”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/13/berman-revelations-show-trump-weaponized-doj/
(excerpt)
Trump accuses Biden not just of hateful rhetoric but also of “weaponizing the Justice Department and the FBI like never, ever before, and raiding and breaking into the homes of their political opponents.” There is no acknowledgment from Trump, or his purblind defenders, that the FBI only searched Mar-a-Lago because he refused to turn over classified material that might endanger national security. The court-ordered search on Aug. 8 unearthed more than 100 classified documents — including, reportedly, top-secret information about another nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Far from being weaponized against Trump, the Justice Department has shown great forbearance in dealing with him. The FBI waited many months to take back the documents Trump was hoarding and did not arrest Trump when they were found in his possession, as it surely would have done with any other disgruntled former government employee.
If you want to see evidence of the Justice Department actually being weaponized against political opponents, read the new memoir by Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2018 to 2020.
Berman claims that political appointees at “Main Justice” repeatedly pressed him to investigate John F. Kerry after the former secretary of state and senator made Trump furious by criticizing his decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal. Trump demanded that Kerry be prosecuted for violations of the Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from engaging in unauthorized diplomacy. Berman writes that he refused to act, because the law is vague and no one has ever been convicted of violating it.
According to Berman, Trump appointees also pressured him to launch an investigation of Gregory B. Craig, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, on charges of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Berman reports that a Justice Department official told him, in reference to the indictments of Trump supporters, “It’s time for you guys to even things out.” After Berman refused to indict Craig, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia charged him with a single count of making false statements. Craig was acquitted by a jury.
While insisting that he go after Democrats, Berman writes, Trump appointees pressured him successfully to scrub from the indictment of Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen any references to Trump (“Individual 1”) having “coordinated with” Cohen to violate campaign finance laws.
For refusing to regularly do the president’s dirty work, Berman writes, he was fired in June 2020 by Attorney General William P. Barr: “The truth was that Barr was desperate to get me out of the job I was in, and it was not to put a better U.S. attorney in place. The reasons were perfectly obvious. They were based in politics.” (Barr himself would leave office a few months later after refusing to go along with Trump’s demands to use the Justice Department to overturn the election results.)
If we were dealing with a normal ex-president, the Berman revelations would be a major scandal that would be considered worse than Watergate. But because we are dealing with the most scandal-ridden president in U.S. history, they have barely registered. In a familiar pattern, Trump’s misconduct in keeping classified documents has drawn media attention away from his misconduct in politicizing the Justice Department. At least the Senate Judiciary Committee will now investigate Berman’s allegations.
These latest revelations, assuming they are accurate, further show that Biden was absolutely right to warn about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his followers. If Trump returns to office, he will find minions far more pliable than Berman — or even Barr — to carry out his authoritarian agenda. Biden is defending democracy, not threatening it, by calling out the MAGA plot against America. Any suggestion otherwise is simply gaslighting.