Schiff Outmaneuvers Trump During Sunday ‘Meet The Press’ After SDNY Firing

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The Trump administration isn’t exactly earning many fans. At the end of last week, Attorney General Bill Barr pressured Geoffrey Berman off the job as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, offering no apparent immediate details of an explanation. After Barr lied that Berman was resigning, the attorney general then got Trump to supposedly step in to fire Berman directly. This weekend during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) roundly condemned the Trump administration’s dangerously belligerent behavior, and he touted Congressional efforts to reveal the corruption that Trump, Barr, and their cronies might like to keep hidden.

At the time of his unceremonious firing, Berman’s office had investigated a number of cases related to the president, which may have attracted the Trump team’s ire. President Donald Trump himself has previously established that he’s perfectly willing to intervene in investigations he doesn’t like when it suits him — after just months on the job as president, Trump fired the then-head of the Russia investigation, FBI Director James Comey. Special Counsel Robert Mueller outlined a significant number of instances in which the president has been accused of obstruction of justice.

In this case, Schiff commented:

‘Berman clearly had a concern about why he was being pushed out, and given the firings of these inspector generals, given the way that Barr has sought to intervene in cases to help out people like Michael Flynn or Roger Stone and to seek additional punishment for people like Michael Cohen, then you really have to question what’s really at the basis of this Friday night attempted massacre and now completed one.’

Indeed — Berman is far from the first recent seemingly politically motivated firing of someone getting close to the Trump team. For example, the president also recently fired Steve Linick from his post as the inspector general overseeing the State Department. Linick, who was responsible for oversight of the department, had been conducting a number of investigations of cases involving the Trump-appointed Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.

On Sunday, after host Chuck Todd asked if observers “should expect to see Mr. Berman in front of Congress in the next week or two,” Schiff continued:

‘I certainly hope that he will come and testify before Congress, and I know Chairman Nadler intends to investigate this, and he should. It’s, I think, the most disastrous management of the Justice Department in modern memory, and like so much of what we have seen in this administration, it doesn’t come as a surprise anymore, but yet, it’s completely demoralizing to the people in the department and dangerous to the rule of law.’

Watch Schiff’s comments below:

Nadler has invited Berman to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. He invited him to a hearing scheduled for this week about politicization of the Justice Department, but Nadler subsequently stated that Berman “has earned a moment to catch his breath” but “understands that he has an open invitation to testify before the Committee.”

This week, Nadler’s committee is already slated to hear from figures like Aaron Zelinsky, a federal prosecutor who’d been handling Trump ally Roger Stone’s case but stepped away from the case in apparent protest after Barr’s team intervened to lower the government’s sentencing recommendation for Stone.