MANHATTAN (CN) – Among treasured mementos from his decades on the bench, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman has a picture in his chambers of when the mayor of New York City swore him into his first judicial post.
Three years before President Bill Clinton would appoint Berman to the Southern District of New York, the black-and-white image from 1995 shows Mayor Rudy Giuliani behind a lectern bearing the city seal at a ceremony appointing Berman to Queens Family Court.
This was the “old Rudy,” as Berman put it in an interview 23 years later.
Before Giuliani moved into Gracie Mansion in 1994, the Brooklyn native spent eight years at a very senior level in the Justice Department followed by another five as an aggressive federal prosecutor in the Southern District.
“In retrospect, I may have been one of the first people to encounter professionally the 'new Rudy,’” said Berman, referring to recent criminal proceedings where Giuliani represented Reza Zarrab against charges that he helped Iran launder billions of dollars through Turkish banks.
Hired by Zarrab after the gold trader’s arrest in 2016, Giuliani and ex-Attorney General Mike Mukasey worked behind the scenes, without stepping foot in court, on a quasi-diplomatic mission between Ankara and Washington to have Zarrab freed as part of a prisoner swap.
Berman took care, during an interview in his chambers, to show how Giuliani's machinations in the case left him gobsmacked. In addition to speaking at length about the former mayor's "unusual" conduct, Berman dwelled on Giuliani some more in a sheet of hand-written notes.
“I am still stunned by the fact that Rudy was hired to be - and he very actively pursued - being the 'go between' between President Trump and Turkey's President Erdogan in an unprecedented effort to terminate this federal criminal case in the middle of the case,” Berman wrote in notes he prepared for the interview.
“Had Rudy succeeded, he and the two presidents I mentioned, would have helped very significantly the country of Iran – which was the beneficiary of the conspiracies to avoid USA sanctions against Iran, i.e. the very heart of the allegations in this case,” the notes continue. “My head still spins when I consider that.”
Though Giuliani was most publicly associated with his role as a surrogate for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the former mayor had also joined the law firm Greenberg Traurig in January of that year. Giuliani resigned from the firm last month, shortly after taking a leave of absence to focus on special counsel Robert Mueller's probe of Russian influence in Trump's campaign. The White House referred comment on Giuliani to his outside counsel, Jay Sekulow. A spokesman for Sekulow at the American Center for Law and Justice did not return a press inquiry on his cellphone.
Berman recalled that the “old Rudy” staked his political reputation as an anti-Iran hawk who forged his anti-terrorism bona fides in the fires of the fallen Twin Towers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In every sense calm and measured, Berman let out a characteristically quiet exclamation about Giuliani's transformation: “I mean, how ironic!”
Zarrab ultimately pleaded guilty to seven counts of sanctions violations, money laundering and bribery when Giuliani's pressure in his case failed. The ensuing cooperation agreement Zarrab reached with prosecutors led to a trial here that would make Judge Berman a household name halfway across the world.