The Wrong Justice Department Official Lost His Job This Weekend

[Zorro]

The attorney general, Bill Barr, undermined the rule of law by forcing out Geoffrey Berman, the United States attorney in Manhattan.

By Preet Bharara

President Trump has long made clear that, for him, “rule of law” is a limited-utility slogan. By word and deed, he has demonstrated his belief that the law and its instrumentalities exist to serve him, personally and politically.

He has pressured individuals and institutions to pervert their usual independent government missions to comply with a mandate of pure self-interest to protect the president’s friends and pursue the president’s adversaries. This explains Trump’s ire at his former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia investigation; recusal made the protection part of the mandate harder to accomplish.

It also explains the president’s conduct at the heart of impeachment — using the diplomatic and financial levers of government to coerce Ukraine into announcing a damaging investigation of Joe Biden, his chief political rival. The episode is what former Russia adviser Fiona Hill disparagingly referred to in her testimony as “a domestic political errand.”

Trump’s latest domestic political errand involves the office I led for almost eight years — the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, commonly known as S.D.N.Y., a place where politics is supposed to be off limits. The United States Attorney Geoffrey Berman was fired on Saturday in a manner and under circumstances that warrant criticism and scrutiny.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/opinion/trump-bill-barr-geoffrey-berman.html

[NBachers]

1. Preet Bharara for Attorney General in the Biden Administration.

[BigmanPigman]

2. I watched him earlier today on CNN

and he said tRump/Barr were still after revenge for Berman recused himself from the Cohen case. Like with Sessions, tRump loves to get revenge and holds grudges for life over the smallest things. Remember he was laughed at by people at the W House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011after Obama joked about Birtherism.