Ran Sdny News Today

justice department. his message was unambiguous. it was time for me, jeffrey berman, the u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york and lifelong republican, it was time for me to take one for the home team. he came into my office and closed the door, quote, youre not going to believe the conversation i just had with ocallaghan, before sharing the details. the top leadership at doj wanted me to bring criminal charges against a private attorney who had once been president barack...

weve got it, weve got it, it comes out tomorrow, but weve got it here is how it starts. miley deputy, robert crews, army resolved in urgent phone call from the top of the u.s. services department. the midterm elections were less than two months ago weighing. house and senate, but the next two years of the trump -- investigations. he spoke with eduardo callahan, a high-level trump political appointees at the justice department his message to cause army was then ambiguous. it was time fo...

Two senator, he has written to the justice department tonight and announced that the judiciary committee is launching a formal investigation. hes asked the department to hand over its documents and communications around these episodes that you described. do you believe that there will be documentation that these communications will be noted in some way that the department can provide to the judiciary committee so they can investigate these allegations? >> oh, im sure there are documents that are...

Sympathetic to that critique, particularly because we have seen so many books by people who were in the trump administration, saw horrible things, and waited until they were paid to write about until they wrote about it. in this case, geoffrey berman does get some credit for squawking at the time, for squawking when the bad things were happening. heres what i mean by that. in 2020, five months before the election, attorney general bill barr told geoff berman he needed to resign because barr said...

Wanted me out. as an attorney, i avoid allegations that do not yet have the facts to support. that i do not yet have the facts to support, but it was no secret to me much of what we did at sdny and much of what we did not do displeased trump. if it displeased the president, it would have dispoliced barr. thats how it worked. it was remarkable how many times barr intervened in the southern district in a course of a year in a half in ways that would benefit or please trump. at the time i was fired...

Attorney there and put in his operatives and took it over for trump, and then started doing favors for trump allies. thats what he did in d.c. and geoff berman believed thats what he was going to do at sdny, and geoff berman stopped that from happening when he refused to resign, refused to go along when barr said he must resign, when barr in fact said he had resigned, geoff berman publicly pushed back on what barr was doing, and he publicly pushed back on anyone interfering in sdnys ongoing case...

Trumps justice department tells sdny not only that they want to evaluate the basis of cohens plea and they want sdny to stop investigating anybody else who might have been involved in those crimes committed by the trump campaign to try to cover up evidence of alleged affairs. sdny also was contacted by trumps justice department, senior officials, and they were told that they needed to get rid of all mentions of individual one in the michael cohen indictment. sdny said no to that, they resisted. ...

Justice. i have to ask, the implication of that explanation in your book is that its possible that you believed it was sort of a crime, what happened to your office, what trump appointees were trying to do to sdny was criminal obstruction of justice. is that the implication youre raising here? >> i havent focused on whether its a crime or not, but i can tell you, it violated all the norms and traditions of the department of justice, which is supposed to be independent from politics. and trump tu...

Officials then told geoffrey berman and sdny officials to do it. berman refused saying there was no case there. trump justice department officials shopped it to another u.s. attorney, trying to get another prosecutor to bring it. that prosecutor refused to bring the case as well. when the campaign finance hush money case was according to berman purposely stalled out after michael cohen pled guilty in that case, when it was then being investigated by state prosecutors, berman describes the trump ...

Wielded by mean vindictive men, using the u.s. justice department the way that trump did, to go after your enemies and to reward your friends, using the justice department that way, that is really high up there on the list of bad things that can happen in the government. and what is now on the public record about what trump did with the rule of law, with doj when he was president, its worse than anything of the kind ever done by any other u.s. president, including richard nixon, and he was bad o...