Bill Barr will not be missed by most of the hundreds of nonpartisan career prosecutors inside the Department of Justice. Least of all, though, by the lawyers working for the Southern District of New York, whose jurisdiction covers most of Donald Trump’s hometown—and whose continuing probes of the president’s associates, including an investigation of Rudy Giuliani, are far less likely to be squashed. “Everything depends on the facts and witnesses in those cases,” a former senior SDNY official says. “But certainly they are more likely to proceed without Barr in there, who was just a disgrace. In every way.”
Barr—whose departure from the office of attorney general was announced on Monday after taking a Twitter battering from Trump—politicized nearly every corner of the Justice Department. His most prominent, and most effective, interference took place in Washington, whether he was preemptively and misleadingly spinning the findings of the Mueller report or intervening in the cases against Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. But his attempts to meddle in New York were unrelenting, an SDNY insider says—and the stakes were higher because the investigations threatened to come closer to the president.
Only a few of Barr’s moves to mess with SDNY cases have become public so far. The most glaring known episode was plenty bad. This past spring, after dodging impeachment, Trump purged a series of inspectors general. The SDNY had already sent the president’s previous personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to prison, and was now asking questions about his current one, Giuliani. One Friday in June, Barr abruptly summoned Geoffrey Berman, the head of the Southern District, to a meeting at the Pierre hotel. Barr suggested—wink, wink—that Berman accept a transfer or a new job, so that a New Jersey golfing buddy of Trump’s could be installed as U.S. attorney. When that nudge went nowhere, Barr told Berman that if he didn’t give up the job voluntarily, he would be fired. Berman stood firm. That night Barr issued a press release claiming Berman had quit. Not true, Berman said, and he wasn’t going anywhere. The next day Barr declared Trump had dismissed Berman and that Berman’s chief deputy, Audrey Strauss, would be taking over at SDNY.
Strauss has staunchly maintained the office’s independence. Yet Barr’s exit was eagerly anticipated at SDNY, even if he had waited until January 20 to leave, and even if Biden has yet to unveil his own nominee for attorney general. The conventional wisdom is that Biden’s A.G. will face fraught choices about whether to pursue Trump–connected cases. The solution should actually be fairly simple: leave it to the prosecutors in the field to handle. “For four years we’ve had an administration where politics was so injected into DOJ,” says Mimi Rocah, a Southern District alumnus and the district attorney-elect for Westchester County, just north of the city. “The only way out of that is to stop making decisions with political concerns in mind.”
“Look, whoever comes in as A.G., things are gonna change pretty damn quickly,” a former top New York federal prosecutor says. “A new leader will be half the battle in restoring the integrity of the department.”
Southern District veterans presume that the office has evaluated Trump–related cases on their merits all along—but they uniformly expect those merits to get a much fuller hearing soon. “I have no doubt that facts have driven the office’s investigations and its decisions the past four years,” says Glen Kopp, whose work as an assistant U.S. attorney at SDNY included a wide variety of fraud and money-laundering cases. “But if there are Trump cases, is it more likely they go forward? Yeah. And I think SDNY’s confidence in leadership at the top levels of Main Justice backing up whatever they do will change.”
Even with Barr gone, the intrigue isn’t quite finished. Strauss may well be asked to stay on temporarily, but her term as interim head of SDNY is due to expire four days before inauguration day, creating a possible window for White House mischief. “It’s hard to do a lot of damage in a short period of time on a particular case,” the former top prosecutor says. “What are they gonna do—shut down an investigation that could be reinitiated in three weeks?” More plausible is that Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen, proves even more willing to wave Trump’s pardons through. Giuliani could receive a get-out-of-jail-free card before being charged with any crimes. (Giuliani’s own lawyer maintains that the former mayor has nothing to worry about because he hasn’t done anything wrong.) For now, though, Southern District lawyers are exhaling. “Barr’s guiding principle was to protect Trump,” Rocah says. “Having that not hanging over prosecutors is a good thing.”
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