Former federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman has accused former Attorney General Bill Barr of firing him from office because his department’s investigations at the time threatened Trump’s re-election chances in 2020.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” on Monday, Berman, who was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told host Rachel Maddow that his department was working on several cases, including one involving former chief strategist Steve of the White House was involved. Bannon in the months leading up to the election.
Maddow read from a book by Berman to be published titled “Holding the Line” and asked the former federal prosecutor to raise the idea that Barr “undoubtedly believed that by removing me he was a threat to the reelection of Trump could take away.”
“How was your job as a US attorney a threat to Trump’s reelection?” asked Maddow.
“Well, at the time I was fired, the Southern District of New York was working on some politically sensitive cases. One of those cases is the Steve Bannon ‘we’re building the wall’ case and we were close to charging that case around the time I was fired, and Barr knew about the case,” Berman told Maddow.
Once Bannon was indicted by Berman’s successor, Trump pardoned Bannon, which Berman called “outrageous.”
He also noted that his office had also investigated Lev Parnes and Igor Fruman, two Trump allies, who were eventually convicted of campaign finance charges involving funneling money from a Russian tycoon into US political campaigns.
Earlier Monday, Berman told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the Trump administration’s Justice Department had pressured him to indict former Obama midterm adviser Greg Craig and former Secretary of State John Kerry. to prosecute.
Trump fired Berman in 2020 after he refused to resign from office.
“I’ve never seen anything like it and I was a junior district attorney in the Southern District in the early ’90s and I’d never seen anything like it,” Berman told GMA co-anchor George Stephanopoulos. “People who have been in the office for 40 years have never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented and terrifying.”
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