(CN) — When Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman pushed back against Attorney General Bill Barr’s attempt to oust him late on Friday night, the standoff between a top prosecutor and the Trump administration had a startling sense of déjà vu.
Three years apart, two Manhattan U.S. attorneys refused requests from Washington to quietly step down from their posts in extraordinary flare-ups of rebellion. Both involved whispers of political interference with cases of interest to the president. Both resulted in the prosecutors being fired, and both men wound up replaced by their trusted deputies.
Berman’s crusading predecessor Preet Bharara had lived through this sequence of events in 2017.
Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor who witnessed Bharara’s firing, remembers what happened vividly.
“I was in the office when Preet was fired, and that was a very demoralizing, disheartening moment,” Nawaday recalled in a phone interview on Sunday. “And [Berman’s ouster] seemed even worse because of the way it went down.”
Just more than a month after Trump’s inauguration, Bharara received an unexpected phone call from the newly sworn-in president. Viewing the contact as a breach of Department of Justice protocol, Bharara refused to pick up the line and anticipated the worst. One of Bharara’s money-laundering cases against a gold trader named Reza Zarrab had embarrassed the Turkish government, and Zarrab’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani had been shuttling between Washington and Turkey’s capital of Ankara lobbying to free his client. Trump reportedly tried to personally intervene to make the case disappear.
Refusing to step down, Bharara publicly forced Trump to fire him.
“The whole weekend we were just all talking and commiserating,” Nawaday reflected, referring to the aftermath of Bharara’s dismissal. “What should we do? Is there anything we can do? It was almost like we wanted to have some sort of protest or walkout, and then, in the end, we did a receiving line for Preet when he left.”
Zarrab ultimately would plead guilty to funneling billions of dollars to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions and testify against a manager of Turkey’s state-run Halkbank.
Some two years later, Berman would charge Halkbank with the same crimes, reportedly over Barr’s objections. Halkbank’s indictment fell shortly after Trump precipitously withdrew U.S. troops from Syria after a phone call with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
On the week Berman was fired, former Secretary of State John Bolton would accuse Trump of trying to interfere with the Halkbank case in a pattern of doing favors for one of the “dictators he liked”: Erdoğan, who had been implicated in the money-laundering scheme.
Jennifer Rodgers, another ex-prosecutor who spent more than a decade in the Southern District of New York, noted that none of the usual reasons for replacing a U.S. attorney applied to Berman.
“It's so clear to me that they actually are in bad faith acting to try to control and influence cases and investigations in the Southern District,” Rodgers said in an interview. “Not just because that's been a repeat pattern for them and because common sense tells you it's true and because they still to date have not given any reason why Berman should be removed.”
Before announcing Berman’s departure in a press release, the Department of Justice reportedly offered him a position as chief of the civil division.
“Why in the world would you remove someone and offer them something bigger?” Rodgers asked. “It can't be a performance-related issue.”
Barr had initially called for Berman to be replaced by the current U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Craig Carpentino, pending the Senate’s confirmation of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton, whom Trump nominated for the position.
