President Trump today personally fired the United States Attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, whose office has pursued one case after another that has rankled the president and his allies, putting his former personal lawyer in prison and investigating his current one.
It was the culmination of an extraordinary clash after years of tension between the White House and New York federal prosecutors.
In a letter released by the Justice Department, Attorney General Bill Barr accused Berman of choosing “public spectacle over public service” because he would not voluntarily step down from the position.
“Because you have declared that you have no intention of resigning, I have asked the President to remove you as of today, and he has done so,” the letter read.
Barr said Berman’s top deputy, Audrey Strauss, would become the acting United States Attorney.
The dismissal of Berman came after his office brought a series of highly sensitive cases that worried and angered Trump and others in his inner circle.
First, there was the arrest and prosecution in 2018 of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime legal fixer.
Then, there was the indictment last year of a state-owned bank in Turkey with political connections that had drawn the president’s attention.
More recently, the Manhattan prosecutors launched an inquiry into Rudy Giuliani, rump’s personal lawyer and one of his most ardent supporters.
These simmering tensions finally erupted Friday night in the most public fashion possible as Barr suddenly announced that Berman was stepping down — only to discover two hours later that Berman had made his own announcement: that he was going nowhere.
Given the number of sore spots between Trump’s Justice Department and its most prominent outpost, it remained unclear precisely what prompted Barr to seek Berman’s removal well after nightfall at the start of a summer weekend.
At least two of the politically sensitive cases — involving the Turkish bank and Giuliani — remain ongoing.
Speaking briefly to reporters outside the White House before heading to a campaign rally in Tulsa., Okla., Trump appeared to contradict Barr and distance himself from the firing, saying he was “not involved.”
Throughout the day on Saturday, many current and former employees of the Southern District of New York, as the Manhattan prosecutors’ office is formally known, marveled at just how sour relations with their colleagues in Washington had gotten.
Some worried openly that the move threatened the independence of federal prosecutors.
“While there have always been turf battles between the Southern District and the Justice Department in Washington, and occasionally sharp elbows, to take someone out suddenly while they’re investigating the president’s lawyer, it is just unprecedented in modern times,” said David Massey, a defense attorney, who served as a Southern District prosecutor for nearly a decade.
The struggle over Berman came amid a broader purge of administration officials, one that has intensified in the months since the Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump at an impeachment trial.
Since the beginning of the year, the president has fired or forced out inspectors general with independent oversight over executive branch agencies and other key figures from the trial.
But the decision to remove Berman unfolded with particularly dizzying speed and seemed to take even several of the participants aback.
On Friday, Barr came to New York to meet with senior New York Police Department officials and, after nearly a month of public protests, to talk with them about “policing issues that have been at the forefront of national conversation and debate,” according to a Justice Department news release.
When he later met with Berman, according to two people familiar with the conversation, Barr suggested that Berman could take over the civil division of the Justice Department if he agreed to leave his position in Manhattan.
But Berman declined, and Barr quickly moved to fire him, announcing his decision in a highly unusual late-night Justice Department news release.
Hours later, Berman issued a counterstatement denying he was leaving.
“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Berman’s statement said. He added that he had learned of Barr’s actions only from the news release.
In one sign that Barr’s efforts may have been hastily arranged, even the man poised to take Berman’s place, Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, appeared to be caught off guard.
Clayton, who is friendly with Trump and has golfed with the president at his club in Bedminster, N.J., had recently signaled to his friends that he wanted to return to his home in New York City and was interested in Berman’s job.
Still, Clayton sent an email to his staff on Thursday saying that he looked forward to seeing them in person, once work-at-home restrictions that had been put in place because of the coronavirus could be lifted.
The email offered no indication that Clayton was planning to leave the S.E.C., according to a person briefed on it.
Just after midnight on Saturday, Clayton sent another email to his employees, telling them about his new position.
“Pending confirmation,” he wrote, “I will remain fully committed to the work of the commission and the supportive community we have built,” according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.
Before Barr released his statement, Berman pointedly showed up to work on Saturday, arriving at his office in Lower Manhattan carrying a brown leather briefcase and clad in a blue suit. He was met outside the squat gray concrete building by a handful of photographers and television crews.
“I’m just here to do my job,” he said, before walking inside.
Under Trump, the Justice Department has long believed that the Southern District was out of control. In no small part that was because prosecutors delayed in warning their colleagues in Washington that they were naming name Trump — as “Individual-1” — in court documents in the Cohen prosecution.
When Barr became attorney general, officials in the deputy attorney general’s office, which oversees regional prosecutors, asked him to rein in Berman, who they believed was exacerbating the Southern District’s propensity for autonomy.
The office has embraced its nickname the “Sovereign District” of New York because of its tradition of independence.
One particular point of contention was the question of how Berman and his staff should investigate Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank that the office indicted last year, according to one department and two current lawyers.
In a new book, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, wrote that Trump had promised the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2018 that he would intervene in the investigation of the bank, which had been accused of violating sanctions against Iran.
Then there was the inquiry into Mr. Giuliani, which has focused on whether he violated laws on lobbying for foreign entities in his efforts to dig up dirt in Ukraine on the president’s political rivals.
That probe began after.Berman’s office brought indictments against two of Giuliani’s close associates.
Trump has told advisers he was pleased with the move to dismiss Berman, and a person close to the president described it as a long time coming.
Trump has been dissatisfied with Berman, despite choosing him for the post himself, going back to 2018.
That year, he told the acting attorney general at the time, Matthew Whitaker, that he was frustrated that Berman had been recused from the case against Cohen and wanted him to somehow undo it.
A Republican who contributed to the president’s campaign and worked at the same law firm as Giuliani,Berman maintains that the Justice Department cannot fire him because of the way he came into his job.
In 2018, the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, appointed Berman as interim United States Attorney in Manhattan.
But Trump never formally sent Berman’s nomination to the Senate, as is normal protocol.
After 120 days, Berman’s official appointment to the post was made by the judges of the United States District Court.
Berman suggested that only those judges can dismiss him from his position, although that was far from a settled legal matter.
A 1979 Justice Department memo holds the position that the president could fire a prosecutor in Berman’s position.
Last year, Barr considered replacing Berman with Edward O’Callaghan, a top Justice Department official and a former Southern District prosecutor, according to people familiar with the matter.
The plan fell through, however, in part because of the complex legal issues around how Berman was appointed.
In another potential issue, ousting Berman last year could have looked like retaliation after his office secured an indictment against the two associates of Giuliani, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Barr’s attempt to fire Berman got pushback on Saturday from an unexpected source: Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close ally of Trump.
Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — the body that would approve Clayton’s nomination — suggested in a statement that he would allow New York’s two Democratic senators to thwart the nomination through a procedural maneuver.
He complimented Clayton but noted that he had not heard from the administration about any formal plans to name him.
New York’s senior senator compared the attempted Berman coup to the events of the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal.
Then-President Richard Nixon wanted Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate his actions, fired. But Nixon’s own attorney general, Elliot Richardson, resigned rather than carry out the firing order.
Later, the deputy attorney general, William Rucklehaus, was fired after he refused to can Cox.
The solicitor general, Robert Bork, wound up fulfilling Nixon’s wish.
Today, Schumer compared Clayton’s current position to that of Richardson’s when Nixon told him to fire Cox.
Schumer challenged Clayton to withdraw his nomination to the U.S. attorney post rather than sully his reputation.
“Forty-seven years ago, Elliot Richardson had the courage to say no to a gross abuse of presidential power,” Schumer said. “Jay Clayton has a similar choice today: He can allow himself to be used in the brazen Trump-Barr scheme to interfere in investigations by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, or he can stand up to this corruption, withdraw his name from consideration and save his own reputation from overnight ruin.”
Schumer further called upon the Inspector General for the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation into the reasons behind the decision by the president and the attorney general to dismiss Berman.