Jul 10, 2020 · Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Geoffrey Berman, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York fired by President Donald Trump, told House lawmakers on Thursday that Attorney General Bill Barr repeatedly asked him to resign in a private meeting before his removal, and warned that his firing could damage his reputation.
By Hillary E. Crawford Jan. 30, 2017 On Monday evening, President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she refused to comply with his executive orders on …
Mar 06, 2021 · Biden fired a Trump-appointed lawyer who refused to leave office Yelena Dzhanova Mar 6, 2021, 11:05 AM President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with labor leaders in the Oval Office of the White...
United States Attorney General | |
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Incumbent Merrick Garland since March 11, 2021 | |
United States Department of Justice | |
Style | Mr. Attorney General (informal) The Honorable (formal) |
Member of | Cabinet National Security Council |
Matthew Whitaker | |
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Preceded by | Jeff Sessions |
Succeeded by | William Barr |
Chief of Staff to the United States Attorney General | |
In office September 22, 2017 – November 7, 2018 |
Naming Weiss to that role would mirror Barr’s decision to elevate John Durham, who was investigating the origins of the Justice Department’s Trump-Russia collusion probe as a U.S. attorney, into a special counsel role, a move that presumably will ensure the integrity of his work in a Biden administration.
Biden underscored the pledge: “I guarantee you that that’s how it will be run.”. As a senator, Biden was particularly critical of another Republican president, George W. Bush, and what he regarded as the politicization of the attorney general position.
In 2007, Biden publicly called for then-AG Alberto Gonzales to resign in part over the decision to fire eight U.S. attorneys amid allegations of Republican meddling in some of their investigations. Several GOP senators said they also had lost faith in Gonzales, and he eventually stepped down.
In his interview with Wallace, Biden defended his call for Gonzales to step down, arguing that the U.S. attorney firings were politically motivated. Biden added that he believed Gonzales had become a “creature of the president, not the attorney for the people as well as representing the president.”.
Trump publicly excoriated his first, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from the Russia probe, and Barr for failing to investigate or prosecute his political opponents. “We will not tell the Justice Department how to do its job,” Harris said in a joint interview she and Biden gave to CNN in early December.
At the time, Senate Republican leader Bob Dole pressed Biden to hold hearings into the firings because he regarded the dismissals as “a severe blow to the administration of justice.”
In Clinton’s case, Biden said there was no political meddling in the investigations, noting that Rostenkowski was convicted and served time in jail, a prosecution carried on by the dismissed U.S. attorney’s replacement.
Geoffrey Berman, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York fired by President Donald Trump, told House lawmakers on Thursday that Attorney General Bill Barr repeatedly asked him to resign in a private meeting before his removal, and warned that his firing could damage his reputation.
Berman was fired by Trump in June after a standoff with Attorney General Barr.
In his statement to lawmakers, Berman said that Barr was not unhappy with his performance, and only said he wanted him to step down from the post "because the Administration wanted to get Jay Clayton into that position."
On June 19, Barr announced that Berman had resigned, and would be replaced by the U.S. attorney in New Jersey in an acting capacity until the Senate confirmed Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton for the post.
Sources familiar with Berman's interview said he repeatedly declined to answer questions about the nature of his work or thoughts on Barr's intentions, and hewed closely to his prepared statement.
Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 6. He said that the seven were fired for job performance issues and not political considerations; these statements lead several of the dismissed attorneys, who had been previously silent, to come forward with questions about their dismissals, partially because their performance reviews prior to their dismissal had been highly favorable.
Allegations were that some of the attorneys were targeted for dismissal to impede investigations of Republican politicians or that some were targeted for their failure to initiate investigations that would damage Democratic politicians or hamper Democratic-leaning voters.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzel stated that some of the emails that had involved official correspondence relating to the firing of attorneys may have been lost because they were conducted on Republican party accounts and not stored properly. "Some official e-mails have potentially been lost and that is a mistake the White House is aggressively working to correct." said Stanzel, a White House spokesman. Stonzel said that they could not rule out the possibility that some of the lost emails dealt with the firing of U.S. attorneys. For example, J. Scott Jennings, an aide to Karl Rove communicated with Justice Department officials "concerning the appointment of Tim Griffin, a former Rove aide, as U.S. attorney in Little Rock, according to e-mails released in March, 2007. For that exchange, Jennings, although working at the White House, used an e-mail account registered to the Republican National Committee, where Griffin had worked as a political opposition researcher."
He also stood by his decision to dismiss the attorneys, saying "I stand by the decision and I think it was the right decision". Gonzales admitted that "incomplete information was communicated or may have been communicated to Congress" by Justice Department officials, and said that "I never saw documents. We never had a discussion about where things stood."
A subsequent report by the Justice Department Inspector General in October 2008 found that the process used to fire the first seven attorneys and two others dismissed around the same time was "arbitrary", "fundamentally flawed" and "raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions".
Attorneys by deleting two provisions: (a) the 120-day maximum term for the Attorney General's interim appointees, and (b) the subsequent interim appointment authority of Federal District Courts. With the revision, an interim appointee can potentially serve indefinitely (though still removable by the President), if the President declines to nominate a U.S. Attorney for a vacancy, or the Senate either fails to act on a Presidential nomination, or rejects a nominee that is different than the interim appointee.
The change in the law undermined the confirmation authority of the Senate and gave the Attorney General greater appointment powers than the President, since the President's U.S. Attorney appointees are required to be confirmed by the Senate and those of the Attorney General did not require confirmation.
President Joe Biden on Friday fired a Trump-appointed lawyer serving on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that investigates workplace sex discrimination and retaliation. Sharon Gustafson, who had under the Trump administration been the EEOC's general counsel, refused to resign, according to an email published online by ...
President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting with labor leaders in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, in Washington, DC. Evan Vucci/AP. The president on Friday dismissed a Trump appointee, Sharon Gustafson, after she refused to resign.