cases. and you know, we are bound by that. and so for example, when i gave congressional testimony after i got fired, and i went to the ethics office of the southern district of new york, and the ethics office of 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 can i talk about it? and the ruling that came down, and i respected it, is that you can t talk about any ongoing investigations because they might be jeopardized. you can t talk about any other cases that went on. you can t even talk about the conversations that you had with other department of justice employees except for two days before you got fired, you can talk about bill barr. that s the authority i had when i went into my congressional testimony. and quite frankly, it was
attorney there and put in his operatives and took it over for trump, and then started doing favors for trump allies. that s what he did in d.c. and geoff berman believed that s 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 sdny s ongoing cases. he insists explicitly and publicly in a press release he was not resigning, they would have to fire him to get out of there, and in so doing, geoffrey berman insured barr wouldn t be able to take over sdny the way he did that d.c. u.s. attorney s office. berman made it so barr was basically forced to put sdny not in the hands of some patsy but instead in the hands of berman s own deputy who was a career
trump s justice department tells sdny not only that they want to evaluate the basis of cohen s 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 trump s 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. but sdny officials did take out of the michael cohen related court filings the most direct language they had in those filings saying what role trump played in those crimes. here s how berman describes it. main justice interfered when the information was being finalized, after michael cohen agreed to plead guilty, the charging
him bluntly, quote, it s time for you guys to even things out. i ignored the edict. but this episode was not a one-off. it was part of a pattern. throughout my tenure, trump s justice department kept demanding i use my office to aid them politically, and i kept declining in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired. i walked this tightrope for 2 1/2 years. eventually, the rope snapped. that s how it starts. that s the very beginning. this was written by geoffrey berman who ran sdny, the u.s. attorney in the southern district of new york for more than half of trump s time in office. he was fired from that job at sdny, fired loudly. and in a way that made a difference. we ll have more on that in a second. that s important. but now, since he is the former u.s. attorney, he has written this book to put it in the
justice. i have to ask, the implication of that explanation in your book is that it s 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 you re raising here? i haven t focused on whether it s 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 turned the department into his own personal law firm. he put in people who would do his bidding. and they would, you know, target trump s political enemies and assist trump s friends. and it was a disgrace. and that s what i kind of detail in the book. several instances of that. you say throughout the book how you tried to stay and fight,