How Trump's DOJ Pressured The SDNY To Aid The White House

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🗓️ 20 September 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Geoffrey Berman served as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. In his memoir, Holding the Line, he describes how the Dept. of Justice demanded he use his office to aid the Trump administration. "The Department of Justice has to remain independent of politics," Berman says. "It's supposed to be unbiased. And what happened was President Trump treated the Department of Justice like his own personal law firm, and he put people in charge there who did his bidding."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Jeffrey Burman, served as US attorney in the Southern
0:06.0	District of New York, leading the Southern District for two and a half years during the Trump
0:10.6	administration. In his new memoir, he writes that Trump's Justice Department kept demanding that
0:16.9	Burman use his office to aid the administration politically, and Burman kept declining in ways
0:23.0	just tactfully enough to keep him from being fired. But after walking the tightrope for two and a
0:28.1	half years, he says the rope snapped. Burman was told to resign but resisted and was then forced
0:34.4	out in an unconventional way. One of the cases he says that the Justice Department interfered with
0:40.6	involved Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohn. Burman also alleges that after the Southern
0:46.2	District prosecuted two prominent Trump allies, the DOJ pushed it to prosecute Democratic lawyer
0:53.0	Greg Craig before election day to quote even things out. The book led Senator Dick Durbin,
0:59.5	chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to open an investigation last week into Burman's
1:04.5	allegations that the Trump Justice Department pressured the Southern District to create positive
1:09.7	outcomes for the administration. Burman's memoir is titled, Holding the Line.
1:16.7	Jeffrey Burman, welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, thank you. So, Dick Durbin had of the Senate Judiciary
1:22.9	Committee has opened this investigation into the Justice Department's interference in the Southern
1:27.9	District's prosecutions in an attempt to support then President Trump. Did you expect that?
1:33.7	Did you hope for that kind of investigation? Well, Terry, it didn't surprise me that there would
1:40.8	be a congressional inquiry. I mean, the instances of interference are so unprecedented and outrageous
1:49.3	and violate the cardinal rule of the Department of Justice that partisan political concerns are
1:57.2	not supposed to enter into decision making. So, it didn't surprise me and I welcome
2:04.0	the congressional inquiry and I'm going to cooperate any way I can with it. And hopefully, I'm sure
2:11.6	it's going to shed new light on the conduct of the Justice Department under Bill Barr and others
	...

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