(CN) — Eight days before Election Day, former federal prosecutor Phillip Halpern appeared on Trump attorney-turned-political adversary Michael Cohen’s podcast Monday during which he detailed why his concerns about Attorney General William Barr’s “meddling” in the Department of Justice and the election caused him to resign after nearly four decades.
Halpern, a 36-year career prosecutor who worked in the Southern District of California, announced in a scathing op-ed published in The San Diego Union-Tribune on Oct. 14 that he was leaving the Justice Department due to what he called Barr’s “slavish obedience to Donald Trump’s will in his selective meddling with the criminal justice system.”
He served under 19 different attorneys general and six different presidents.
One of the federal prosecutors who brought a campaign finance fraud indictment against San Diego Representative Duncan Hunter — which resulted in a guilty plea and 11-month prison sentence, Halpern stayed at his post to see the case through the finish line.
He went on Cohen’s podcast “Mea Culpa” on Monday and warned Barr’s election policy change has “flown under the radar” and is already impacting the election.
Halpern said the Department of Justice, for decades, had a policy against talking about investigations or bringing charges of election fraud right before an election.
But Barr changed that policy, Halpern said, if the alleged election fraud “involved any component of the federal government,” including the U.S. Postal Service and mail-in ballots.
“It’s a hole big enough to drive a truck through and what Bill Barr is saying is that we can make announcements about those types of potential cases before the election when we’ve never done that in the past — that’s problematic,” Halpern said.
He noted Trump has bandied about a case in Pennsylvania this year where nine military ballots were found discarded.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said the ballots were discarded in error and it was not intentional fraud.
“That incident was seized upon by Donald Trump, who made allegations of voter fraud, basing it on those nine ballots in Pennsylvania to suggest widescale fraud,” Halpern told Cohen.
“We’ve already seen how the president can weaponize this change by Bill Barr and why it’s so important every citizen not pay attention to these wild claims,” he added.
Halpern said Barr’s misrepresentation of the contents of the Mueller report before it was released in full to the public made him concerned about the direction of the Justice Department under his leadership.
“At the beginning, I thought maybe it was a mistake — I was hoping for the best. It was only when it became a pattern and practice of the attorney general representing the president’s interests rather than the interest of the American public that I became truly concerned and was worried about the direction the country was headed,” Halpern said.
He said “selective meddling” by Barr in the high-profile prosecutions of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn was “unprecedented” and prompted “rebellions” by prosecutors involved in the Flynn case and the Stone prosecutor to quit, Halpern said.
Halpern compared Barr’s “meddling” in the prosecutions to the “dirty tricks” of former Attorney General John Mitchell during the Watergate scandal.
Mitchell served 19 months in prison for his involvement in the conspiracy.
“Every American citizen should be scared when we have an attorney general that is willing to go after the president’s political adversaries or perceived enemies. That’s a problem,” Halpern said.
But it wasn’t just the meddling in those cases that concerned Halpern about the DOJ under Barr’s leadership — it was the concern he’d do the same in his prosecution of Hunter at President Trump’s suggestion.
Hunter, one of two original members of Congress to support Trump’s then-candidacy for president, famously called the campaign charges against him a “witch hunt.”
Trump tweeted at former Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the indictment was filed a few months before the 2018 midterm elections suggesting the red seat would be up for grabs to be filled by a Democrat due to the charges.
“When I heard that as a line prosecutor trying to prosecute a politician who’s corrupt, that the president of the United States is tweeting about my case saying he’s unhappy with the outcome, I was very nervous,” Halpern said.
“When I witnessed under Bill Barr how the Justice Department was willing to meddle in cases at the president’s bidding, I was very upset and I made the decision I needed to stay on and finish that case to make sure it was done and that nobody was going to stop it,” Halpern said.
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