The interview with Geoffrey S. Berman, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, is part of Democrats’ inquiry into potential Justice Department politicization.
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.
Mr. 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.
Mr. Berman’s planned testimony comes amid a shake-up 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. Mr. Donoghue is seen within the department as a close ally of Mr. 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 Mr. Berman’s firing, are likely to stir speculation that they are politically motivated. But President Trump has yet to nominate a successor to Mr. Donoghue, who expects his top deputy, Mark Lesko, to serve as the acting U.S. attorney immediately after his departure. Mr. Trump could install Mr. DuCharme to run the office under the Vacancies Reform Act.
Under Mr. Berman, the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office pursued cases that touched on Mr. Trump’s inner circle, exposing misdeeds by his former personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen.
From nearly the moment that Mr. Barr took office last year, he clashed with Mr. Berman about politically sensitive investigations, including the decision to charge Mr. Cohen with campaign finance offenses 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.
The end of Mr. Berman’s tenure appeared to be hastened after Jay Clayton, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr weeks ago that he would be interested in running the Southern District. Mr. Barr decided to install a lawyer with whom he had a better working relationship, the attorney general said in an interview with NPR.
But Mr. Berman refused to resign, and Mr. Barr issued a news release late on a Friday night last month declaring that Mr. Berman intended to leave. That notice prompted Mr. Berman to publicly say that he had no intention of leaving.
In the end, because of legal issues surrounding Mr. Berman’s appointment, Mr. Barr was forced to ask Mr. Trump to fire him. He also backed away from his plan for temporary succession and installed Mr. Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, to run the office for now.
Mr. Berman’s dismissal also came at a time when Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Rosen — is considered extremely influential, as Mr. 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 Mr. Rosen, who has never been a prosecutor.
Mr. DuCharme, who is Mr. 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 Mr. Barr on criminal and national security matters.
Mr. 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 Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr.
Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, a prosecutor who worked on the investigation into Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. 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 Mr. Stone “because of politics.”
He named several career lawyers who told him that the lenient sentence would be done essentially to appease Mr. Trump, and that the office’s top political appointee feared the president.
A Justice Department spokeswoman has said that Mr. 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 Mr. Barr sought to use an antitrust investigation to harass cannabis companies because he personally disliked the industry. He also said that to please Mr. Trump, the division opened an investigation into automakers who had decided to make cars that emitted fewer pollutants.
Leaders in the antitrust division denied those accusations in an internal memo circulated to the division.
Their testimony and Mr. Berman’s interview are part of the House Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of whether Mr. Barr has politicized the Justice Department and wielded its power to protect and support the interests of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Barr will appear before the panel on July 28.
