WASHINGTON—Geoffrey S. Berman, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan who was abruptly dismissed last month, has agreed to testify in a closed-door hearing before lawmakers next week as part of an inquiry into potential politicization at the Justice Department, according to a House Judiciary Committee notice reviewed by The New York Times.
Berman, who was fired after a brief but highly public standoff over his status with Attorney General William P. Barr, will meet privately on July 9 with members of the committee to discuss the circumstances surrounding his surprise ouster, according to two people familiar with the terms of his testimony.
Berman’s planned testimony comes amid a shakeup at the federal prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn. Richard P. Donoghue, the office’s top prosecutor, will come to Washington to serve as the No. 2 official in the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, a key department post. Donoghue is seen within the department as a close ally of Barr.
The position is currently held by Seth DuCharme, who plans to return to the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office, where he was previously the head of the criminal division. He is being considered to run the office, according to two people familiar with the deliberations.
The moves, coming weeks after Berman’s firing, are likely to stir speculation that they are politically motivated. But President Donald Trump has yet to nominate a successor to Donoghue, who expects his top deputy, Mark Lesko, to serve as the acting U.S. attorney immediately after his departure. Trump could install DuCharme to run the office under the Vacancies Reform Act.
Under Berman, the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office pursued cases that touched on Trump’s inner circle, exposing misdeeds by his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
From nearly the moment that Barr took office last year, he clashed with Berman about politically sensitive investigations, including the decision to charge Cohen with campaign finance offences and how prosecutors in Manhattan should investigate Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank that they indicted last year, according to multiple people familiar with those investigations who were not authorized to publicly discuss the deliberations.
Berman was serving in an acting capacity. The end of his tenure appeared to be hastened after Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told Trump and Barr weeks ago that he would be interested in running the Southern District. Barr decided to install a lawyer with whom he had a better working relationship, the attorney general said in an interview with NPR.
But Berman refused to resign, and Barr issued a news release late on a Friday night last month declaring that Berman intended to leave. That notice prompted Berman to publicly say that he had no intention of leaving.
In the end, because of legal issues surrounding Berman’s appointment, Barr was forced to ask Trump to fire him. He also backed away from his plan for temporary succession and installed Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, to run the office for now.
Berman’s dismissal also came at a time when Trump had been pushing out other administration officials with a degree of independence, including inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out agency fraud and abuse.
On Thursday, Donoghue, the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, notified his office that he would be stepping down to become an official with the Justice Department in Washington, according to people familiar with the matter.
The post he will assume — principal associate deputy attorney general, working under Rosen — is considered extremely influential, as Rosen’s office oversees the nation’s federal prosecutors’ offices. A previous official in the role, Edward O’Callaghan, was best known for overseeing the day-to-day of the Russia investigation.
The job is particularly critical under Rosen, who has never been a prosecutor.
DuCharme, who is Rosen’s current top deputy, will return to the Brooklyn office, where he had worked for his entire career as a prosecutor before he came to Washington last year to advise Barr on criminal and national security matters.
Berman will testify just a week after two Justice Department lawyers told the House Judiciary Committee that political appointees in the prosecutor’s office in Washington and in the antitrust division had intervened in investigations to advance the personal interests of Trump and Barr.
Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, a prosecutor who worked on the investigation into Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime friend, told the committee that senior officials in the Washington U.S. Attorney’s Office demanded a more lenient prison sentence for Stone “because of politics.”
He named several career lawyers who told him that the lenient sentence would be done essentially to appease Trump, and that the office’s top political appointee feared the president.
A Justice Department spokeswoman has said that Zelinsky’s testimony was based on hearsay, and that he had no conversations with the political appointees whose intentions he described.
John W. Elias, a senior career official in the antitrust division, said that Barr sought to use an antitrust investigation to harass cannabis companies because he personally disliked the industry. He also said that to please Trump, the division opened an investigation into automakers who had decided to make cars that emitted fewer pollutants.
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Leaders in the antitrust division denied those accusations in an internal memo circulated to the division.
Their testimony and Berman’s interview are part of the House Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of whether Barr has politicized the Justice Department and wielded its power to protect and support Trump’s interests.
Barr will appear before the panel on July 28.