U.S. Government fires prosecutor who has investigated Trump's environment
The U.S. government on Friday night fired the federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, a powerful official who has investigated the president's entourage, Donald Trump.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced in a statement that Berman was resigning his post and that the president was nominating in his place the current chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jay Clayton, who has no previous experience as a prosecutor.
Berman, however, denied that he had resigned and claimed to have learned from the statement that he was being fired. "I have not resigned and have no intention of resigning," the prosecutor said in a separate statement.
According to The New York Times, the two held a meeting Friday in New York and Barr fired him after Berman refused to resign.
Berman, who is a Republican, is the prosecutor who led the case against Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who collaborated with Justice and was sentenced to prison for various economic crimes.
In addition to Cohen, Berman has also investigated former New York City mayor and now Trump's attorney, Rudy Giulliani, as well as the president's business network and presidential campaign.
According to the Times, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office (officially the Southern District of New York) is perhaps the most prestigious in the country and has a tradition of independence from governments of either color.
Berman's dismissal comes days after the revelations made by former national security adviser John Bolton in his book on Trump, including his willingness to intervene in several federal investigations.
One of these was led by Berman and involved a Turkish company for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, an investigation that Trump promised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "solve".
"Trump then told Erdogan that he would take care of it, explaining that the Southern District Attorneys were not his people, but (Barack) Obama's people, a problem that would be solved when they were replaced by his people," Bolton writes.
