How not to fire someone

Today, Explained

Vox

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Attorney General William Barr tried to quietly push out the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan on Friday night. Then everybody noticed. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:00.0	When you got a fire someone Fridays the day, the weekends around the corner people aren't
0:26.2	thinking about work and no one has to deal with the fallout for a few days. In politics you have the
0:31.0	added advantage of avoiding lots of news coverage. That's why they call it a Friday news dump.
0:36.5	The Trump administration has been dumping a lot of people lately but this past Friday it didn't go
0:41.9	according to plan because the person they tried to fire refused to leave. And it was pretty messy
0:47.7	what went down over the weekend at the US Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York.
0:53.2	And this US Attorney's Office is particularly important. So this is the office that oversees
1:00.1	Manhattan. It's been often referred to somewhat self-importantly perhaps as the sovereign
1:07.8	district of New York. They have a very lofty view of their own independence. And in this administration
1:14.8	in particular they do oversee a lot of cases Trump being from New York of course that have to do
1:22.3	with Trump. Now President Trump has fired the President in charge of this office before. You
1:26.9	might remember him pre-barara and Obama appointee but this time around it was a Trump administration
1:32.8	appointee being fired. There's an attempt not only to get rid of the US Attorney for the Southern
1:39.4	District of New York, Jeffrey Berman but also to institute a temporary replacement for him
1:46.9	and to nominate a new replacement for him. And it basically all comes together to look like
1:54.1	Trump and Barr wanted this guy gone as quickly as possible. Andrew Prokop is back from paternity leave
2:00.9	just in time to help us understand why. We started with the guy Trump and Barr wanted to fire.
2:06.3	Jeffrey Berman. Jeffrey Berman he was never officially confirmed by the Senate to this job but he
2:13.3	was Trump's pick and he ended up being appointed to the job on an acting basis in 2018 and then a bunch
2:21.0	of judges confirmed him to fill the post as long as he wanted to. And so he's been in charge since
2:28.4	early 2018. We will not hesitate to investigate and prosecute those who engage in criminal conduct
2:34.6	that draws into question the integrity of our political process. So he's overseeing stuff like
	...

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