- Trump's DOJ pressured prosecutors to investigate John Kerry, ex-US attorney says in new book.
- The DOJ "kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically," Geoff Berman wrote.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump pressured New York prosecutors to investigate former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, the former Manhattan US attorney writes in his upcoming memoir.
Geoffrey Berman, who led the Southern District of New York before being fired from his post in 2020 by then Attorney General William Barr, writes about the "tightrope" he was forced to walk in his book "Holding the Line," a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Berman says that he then faced pressure from above to prosecute Kerry after Trump accused him of "possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy" in talking to Iranian officials after leaving office. Kerry, as secretary of state, played a key role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal that Trump railed against on the campaign trail and sought to dismantle in office.
"The conduct that had annoyed the president was now a priority of the Department of Justice," Berman wrote, calling it a "clear" and "outrageous" pattern.
He wrote that Department of Justice officials strong-armed the Southern District into investigating Kerry for violating the Logan Act, an obscure and seldom-invoked late 18th-century law, and followed up to push Berman to investigate Kerry more thoroughly whenever Trump tweeted his grievances about Kerry.
Berman closed the probe into Kerry after a year of investigation without bringing charges. But the Department of Justice, in his telling, wasn't satisfied, and moved the investigation to Maryland, which also ended without charges where "the Kerry investigation just quietly died — as it should have."
"Trump's Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired," Berman, who is now in private practice, wrote in his book, according to The Times.
Berman detailed the immense backlash he faced for his office's prosecution of Trump's ex-personal lawyer Michael Cohen on an array of tax and bank fraud charges. Those included pressure from the Department of Justice to remove all mentions of "Individual-1" in referring to Trump in Cohen's charging documents, he said, and efforts by Barr to undo Cohen's conviction on campaign finance charges and stymie related investigations into Trump allies.
And after his office prosecuted both Cohen and GOP Rep. Chris Collins, a staunch Trump ally who pleaded guilty to insider trading charges, Berman said he faced pressure from above to "even things out" by prosecuting Greg Craig, a Democratic election lawyer and Barack Obama's one-time White House counsel, for failing to register as a foreign agent and lying to investigators.
Berman recalled his deputy relaying the message from a top DOJ official Edward O'Callaghan, "It's time for you guys to even things out."
O'Callaghan, in an interview with The Times, denied passing that message to the Southern District and called Berman's account "categorically false."
The case against Craig was eventually moved to DC, where he was tried and acquitted on a single count of making false statements in 2019. Berman wrote that "the verdict felt like justice," saying, "Greg Craig should never have been prosecuted."
"I walked this tightrope for two and a half years," Berman wrote, adding, "Eventually, the rope snapped."
Berman stepped down from his position as Manhattan US attorney after a tense standoff with Barr in June 2020. It capped a whirlwind 18 hours that began with Barr saying that Berman was stepping down, and Berman following up with a statement pushing back and saying he had not resigned and would not do so until a successor was confirmed by the Senate.
Berman went to work as usual the next morning, until Barr sent the Manhattan US attorney a letter saying that Berman had been fired by Trump at Barr's request.
But the former US attorney was notably mum about these political pressures while testifying to the House Judiciary Committee, Politico's Kyle Cheney noted, declining to answer questions about reports that his firing was politically motivated.