Senate Judiciary Committee to Investigate Former US Attorney’s Claim Trump DOJ Pressured His Office to ‘Help Them Politically’

Washington
CNN
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The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate allegations made by former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman in his upcoming book that Trump-era Justice Department officials pressured his office to “help them politically.”

“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Berman writes in the book, according to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of it, “Trump’s Justice Department demanded that I use my office to help them politically, and I kept refusing — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

Berman, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump appointee, was later fired by the former president.

Chief Justice Dick Durbin sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday saying, “These reported allegations indicate stunning and unacceptable departures from the department’s mission to pursue impartial justice, which requires that its prosecutorial decisions be free from political influence.”

“They also compound the already serious concerns raised by then-Attorney General Barr’s 2020 effort to replace Mr. Berman with a Trump loyalist,” the Illinois Democrat wrote.

“If correct, Mr. Berman’s allegations indicate multiple instances of political interference in the Department’s investigative and prosecutorial decisions,” he wrote. “The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate these episodes.”

Durbin also requested that the Justice Department provide the committee with several documents and communications by October 3.

Berman welcomed the committee’s investigation, telling MSNBC Monday night, “I think there needs to be a spotlight on this kind of egregious behavior that really corrupted the Justice Department and turned it into a political instrument of the president.”

He explained why he wrote the book — “Holding the Line,” which comes out Tuesday — saying he “wanted people to understand the full extent of the outrageous and inappropriate political interference by the Trump Justice Department in the cases in the Southern District of New York.”

“It demonstrates what Trump is capable of and what he is likely to do, and it also provides a front-line view of how vulnerable our justice system is,” he said.