Geoffrey Berman - Holding the Line: Inside the Nations Preeminent US Attorneys Office and Its Battle with the Trump Justice Department

My lead deputy, Robert Khuzami, received an urgent phone call from a top official at the US Department of Justice.

The midterm elections were less than two months away. The results would determine not just which party controlled the House and Senate but also if the next two years of the Trump presidency would be dogged by congressional investigations.

Khuzami spoke with Edward OCallaghan, the principal associate deputy attorney general. Despite the convoluted title, OCallaghan held a powerful position within DOJ. His message to Khuzami was unambiguous: it was time for me, Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and lifelong Republican, to take one for the home team.

I had been close to Khuzami since we worked together as young prosecutors in the Southern District in the early 1990s, and when I came back to take the top job, he agreed to join me. He came into my office and closed the door. Youre not going to believe the conversation I had with OCallaghan, he said before sharing the details.

The top leadership at DOJ wanted me to bring criminal charges against Gregory Craig, a private attorney who had once been President Barack Obamas White House counsel. And they wanted me to do so before Election Day.

Khuzami related that OCallaghan told him, bluntly, Its time for you guys to even things out.

Youve got to be fucking kidding me, I said.

I wish, he said, but no.

The charges I was told to bring against Craig involved allegations that he had violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, while representing Ukraines former prime minister. Our office had been investigating the potential FARA violation for months. But DOJs rationale had nothing to do with evidence or law.

OCallaghan kept reminding Khuzami that our office had just prosecuted two high-profile Trump loyalistsCongressman Chris Collins, a Republican from New York, and Trumps private attorney, Michael Cohen.

We both understood that OCallaghan was only the messenger. He was himself an alumnus of the Southern District with a solid reputation. Still, it was galling for those in our office who knew him to learn that he was the one delivering that message.

I ignored the edict. We investigatedthoroughlybut there was, at best, a marginal case to be made. Even if we were foolish enough to go forward, I doubted the charges would ever stand up in front of a jury.

This episode was not a one-off. It was part of a pattern. Throughout my tenure as US attorney, Trumps Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept decliningin ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.

I walked this tightrope for two and a half years.

Eventually, the rope snapped.

The Southern District of New York, known as SDNY, or simply the Southern District, is not just one among ninety-three US attorneys offices across the United States and its territories. George Washington appointed the districts first prosecutor in 1789. The SDNY predates the Department of Justice by eighty years.

It is sometimes referred to as the Sovereign District of New York, which, as backhanded compliments go, is pretty much a classic of the form. What the moniker signifies is that the office is both admired and envied. Among the criminal class, it is feared. Its stubborn independence is sometimes read as arrogance.

But my resistance to Trumps chosen leaders of DOJ was never a matter of pride or turf. It was about protecting a bulwark of the rule of law, a monument to our nations highest values.

Part of what gives SDNY its unique status is geography. The Southern District encompasses all of Manhattan along with the Bronx and six counties to the north of the city. Its headquarters, an unremarkable nine-story building at 1 St. Andrews Plaza in lower Manhattan, sits on the doorstep of Wall Street. Very little of any import or scale takes place in the world without some of the money behind it moving through New Yorks financial institutions. That has long given SDNY not just a national but a global reach.

The office is a magnet for elite legal talent. There were 220 prosecutors who worked under me, including 15 in an office in White Plains. Commonly called AUSAs (the full title is assistant United States attorney), they were generally young, many of them in their late twenties or their thirties. But it was nobodys first job. They came from top law firms, in many cases after first serving in prestigious judicial clerkships after law school.

All of them started out in our version of boot camp, a year in the general crimes unit. Everyone in the office worked long hours, including nights and weekends, for a fraction of the salaries they could earn in the private sector. It was collaborative work; the office functioned as one team.

We partnered on cases with agents from the FBIs New York field office, which has its own legendary reputation, along with highly trained agents and officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration, New York City Police Department, Department of Homeland Security, Postal Inspection Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

The combination of these potent resources, both human and structural, sets the Southern District apart. It was the SDNY that won convictions against the financial fraudsters Bernard Madoff, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken. It prosecuted terrorism cases tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. It put Francis Livoti, the New York Police Department cop who choked and killed Anthony Baez, behind bars. Seventy years ago, SDNY prosecuted the spying cases against Alger Hiss and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

I did my best to carry on this tradition during my tenure as US attorney. We pursued some of the nations most important and high-profile prosecutions: against Chris Collins, the congressman, who pleaded guilty to a brazen insider-trading scheme (and was later pardoned by Trump); Michael Cohen, the presidents former lawyer and fixer, who was convicted on campaign finance and tax charges; and Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex trafficker of girls and young women who committed suicide in prison before we could bring him to trial. (The office later indicted and convicted at trial his close associate and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.)