The former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York claims the Department of Justice pressed his office to prosecute former President Donald Trump‘s political foes, including former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Onetime Manhattan federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman, a former Trump ally and self-declared “Rockefeller Republican,” details his struggles with Trump’s DOJ in his upcoming book Holding the Line, obtained before its planned Tuesday release date by the New York Times.
In the book, he claims Trump’s DOJ decided whether to push or block cases based on partisan concerns, often pressuring him to pursue criminal charges against political enemies. The highest-profile target mentioned in the book came in 2019 when Berman said Trump administration officials asked him to use his position to prosecute Kerry over activity surrounding the Iran nuclear deal Kerry helped negotiate and Trump later abandoned.
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Trump apparently wanted to prosecute Kerry under the 1799 Logan Act, an obscure and unenforced law that banned private citizens from negotiations with foreign governments, per the book. The investigation was requested by Trump’s DOJ shortly after the president’s tweets attacking Kerry, who was reported to have conversations with Iranian and other officials as a private citizen.
“Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry,” Trump tweeted on April 22, 2019, according to the New York Times. “Big violation of Logan Act?” He had previously tweeted about Kerry’s “possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy.”
Berman claims administration officials constantly prodded him as to what was taking so long with the investigation, which lasted roughly a year.
“And they were asking us, basically, what’s taking so long? Why aren’t you going harder and faster at this enemy of the president? There was no other way for me to look at it,” Berman writes.
After the yearlong investigation, the federal prosecutor told the DOJ that he would not be prosecuting Kerry, according to his book. After an attempt to get a Maryland office to take the case resulted in the same conclusion, the investigation “quietly died.” Kerry was apparently never informed about the investigation.
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Berman held his position until 2020, when he was fired after refusing to accept then-Attorney General William Barr’s request that he resign. He currently practices private law.
The report said neither Barr nor a spokesperson for Trump responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
