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, you re not going to believe the conversation i just had with o callaghan, 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 obama s white house counsel and they wanted me to bring those charges before election day. i said, you have got to be f ing kidding me. i wish, he said, but no. doj s rationale for this demand had nothing to do with evidence or law. o callaghan kept reminding him that our office had just prosecuted two high profile trump loyalists, republican congressman chris collins and crump s private attorney, michael cohen. he related that o callaghan told him bluntly, quote, it s time for you guys to ev
we ve got it, we ve got it, it comes out tomorrow, but we ve 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 for me, jeffrey berman, the u.s. attorney for the southern district of new york and lifelong republican, time for me to take one for the home team. it came into my office, closed the door, quote, you re not going to believe the conversation i had without callahan, he said. before sharing the details of the top leadership at doj wanted me to bring criminal charges against gregory craig, a private attorney who had lunched bennett council. they wanted me to bring those charges before election day i
two senator, he has written to the justice department tonight and announced that the judiciary committee is launching a formal investigation. he s 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, i m sure there are documents that are going to be available. you know, rachel, my book, as you know, is all about transparency. you know, i wanted people to understand the full scope of the outrageous and improper political interference by trump s justice department in the cases of the southern district of new york. it demonstrates what trump is capable of and what he s likely to do, and it also provides a front line view of just how
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. here s 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 he wanted to put someone else at the u.s. attorney s job at sdny. berman refused to do that. and as he explains in the book, part of what was going on in his mind when he refused to do that is that he had seen this same play happen just months earlier in washington, d.c. the u.s. attorney in washington, d.c., that one who was willing to bring the non-case against greg craig, she nevertheless, despite going along with that, she nevertheless was pushed out
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. that s 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, the presidential election was less than five months away. i m sure barr was tired of the southern district s independence, but it s fair to assume there was a political component in his move to oust me. barr did the president s bidding no matter how he may try to deny that now. he no doubt believed by removing he, he could eliminate a threat to trump s re-election. geoffrey berman never gave a single interview while he was serving as u.s. attorney. now he s a former u.s. attorney and in his n