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Tag: preet bharara
Former Top SDNY Prosecutor Says Don Jr. ‘In Jeopardy’

Former Top SDNY Prosecutor Says Don Jr. ‘In Jeopardy’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

During a Tuesday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” author and former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara was asked to weigh in on possible legal problems that Donald Trump Jr. could be facing—and he responded that from a legal standpoint, the president’s son might be in “jeopardy.”

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as part of his Russia probe, has been investigating a June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting in New York City that included Trump Jr. as well as the Trump Organization’s Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort (President Trump’s former campaign manager), and several others, including Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya. Subsequently, Trump Jr. testified about his Russian contacts when he testified before the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017.

Co-host Joe Scarborough asked Bharara, “Given what you know about Donald Trump Jr., his testimony before Congress, would you bring charges of perjury against Donald Trump Jr.?” And the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York responded, “I haven’t seen all the evidence. As a former prosecutor, I don’t like to second-guess decisions and anticipate necessarily. I don’t know enough about what his intent was.”

Bharara added, however, “But I do think, though, based on his testimony and some other things, that Donald Trump Jr. is in jeopardy.”

Bharara (author of the new book Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law) went on to say that if Trump Jr. were to face legal peril, “we’re all in jeopardy, because if something were to befall, in a criminal sense, Donald Trump Jr., I don’t know what his father is capable of.”

In December 2017, Trump Jr. testified that in June 2016, his father knew nothing about the Trump Tower meeting. But Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, has disputed that clam.

Legal Experts Deride ‘Lenient’ 47-Month Sentence For Manafort

Legal Experts Deride ‘Lenient’ 47-Month Sentence For Manafort

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Despite a federal guideline recommending a sentence of between 19 and 24 years of imprisonment for Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III issued a surprisingly light sentence  Thursday of just under four years, stunning many observers.

Ellis had been consistently hostile to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team throughout the case, even as he repeatedly found that the prosecutors’ legal arguments had merit. He once suggested that Mueller’s team didn’t really care about Manafort’s crimes but only wanted to use him to get to Trump.

Prosecutors had argued in their sentencing memo that there was scant reason to go easy on Manafort. He continued to commit crimes even after being indicted, he lied to investigators during a cooperation agreement, and he showed no remorse for his crimes. The judge himself even noted that when Manafort addressed the court Thursday, he didn’t express any regret for his crimes. Nevertheless, Ellis said that aside from his crimes, Manafort has led an “otherwise blameless life” and that he had a good relationship with others. This is flatly false — Manafort made a career out of supporting brutal dictators.

Many legal experts noted that Ellis’ sentence seemed wildly out of touch with typical practice:

 

Why New York’s District Attorney Should Reopen That Fox News Investigation

Why New York’s District Attorney Should Reopen That Fox News Investigation

For well over three decades, Robert M. Morgenthau served as the Manhattan District Attorney. A law enforcement legend, Morgenthau became renowned for his zealous pursuit of white-collar offenders.

He believed that “crime in the suites” deserved to be punished just as consistently as crime in the streets — and as a former federal prosecutor, he ignored minor issues such as jurisdiction when he thought justice needed to be done. And he sought expansive interpretations of law wherever he saw the federal government failing to do justice.

Recently I asked a ranking federal prosecutor who once worked for D.A. Morgenthau whether his old boss would have allowed Fox News Channel executives to escape accountability for the crimes of Roger Ailes and their alleged concealment of those crimes from auditors and shareholders.

The answer was a resounding “NO.”

Before New Yorkers first elected him D.A. in 1974, Morgenthau had served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District, appointed by President Kennedy. He resisted fiercely when Richard Nixon sought to remove him under dubious circumstances in 1969. So he would understand the predicament of Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney abruptly fired by Trump last year, after Bharara commenced an investigation of Trump’s friend Ailes and the company’s hidden payoffs to the women he tormented.

As reviewed in this space yesterday, that investigation potentially implicated top executives at Fox, continuing for several months after Ailes died in May 2017. Among those subpoenaed to explain how Fox had paid off those women and concealed those illicit payments was former Fox vice president Bill Shine, who was eventually fired by the network — and then appointed deputy White House chief of staff by Trump last month.

Yet somehow during the period when federal prosecutors questioned Shine and his appointment by Trump, the Fox News investigation went “dormant,” according to major news outlets. During that same period, the acting U.S. Attorney who had replaced Bharara, his former deputy Joon Kim, was replaced in turn by Geoffrey Berman — a former managing partner at Greenberg Traurig, whose clients had included Ailes and News Corp, the parent company of Fox News. Berman was personally interviewed by Trump and recommended by his former law partner Rudolph Giuliani, a confidant of both Ailes and Trump.

Many troubling questions remain unanswered in this matter. When did the Southern District end the investigation of Fox News? Why did prosecutors decide to drop the case? Did Berman recuse himself from that decision? Why was Shine called to testify in that investigation? What was he asked, and what were his answers? Did the White House or the FBI conduct due diligence when Shine was appointed to one of the most powerful positions in government?

Indeed, very little in this narrative inspires confidence — and the absence of transparency only inflames suspicions of wrongdoing. But there is a potential remedy under law.

If crimes were committed in the suites at Fox, those offenses occurred in Manhattan — where Morgenthau’s successor, Cyrus Vance, Jr. now serves as District Attorney. Fairly or not, Vance’s own integrity has been questioned over his decision not to prosecute the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault. Although Vance insists he rejected prosecution of Weinstein due solely to a lack of evidence, that decision is currently under examination by the New York Attorney General.

Should he wish to affirm his integrity and fearlessness, Vance should look into the Fox News case — where a sexual predator just as monstrous as Weinstein escaped punishment for years because his employer, a publicly held company, secretly paid out tens of millions of dollars to hide his misdeeds. For reasons that remain suspiciously opaque, New York’s federal prosecutor let that case lapse. And now a key witness sits in one of the most sensitive positions in the Trump White House, which is notorious for failing to properly vet top officials.

It’s time for Vance should ask himself: “What would Morgenthau do?”

Bill Shine Backstory: Why Did The Federal Probe Of Fox News Go ‘Dormant’?

Bill Shine Backstory: Why Did The Federal Probe Of Fox News Go ‘Dormant’?

With national attention now directed toward state and federal law enforcement agencies in New York — which are reported to be investigating Donald Trump and his associates — perhaps we will learn at last what happened in another troubling investigation, involving Trump’s cronies at Fox News Channel.

Among those cronies is former Fox News vice president Bill Shine, who has since ascended to oversee White House communications as deputy chief of staff to the president. Shine served for years as the top deputy to Roger Ailes, the late Fox News chief fired over his horrific mistreatment of female employees at the network.

Back in 2016, when the indefatigable Preet Bharara still served as the United States Attorney in Manhattan, his office opened a probe of secret and illicitly concealed financial payoffs to the women Ailes had abused. To protect the Fox News chief from the consequences of his own horrific misconduct, the network had paid out as much as $100 million in settlements to those women — and concealed those massive expenditures from its own stockholders.

Lawyers for the women involved and at least one of the victims said that Shine had played a key role in suppressing revelations about Ailes’ brutal misconduct, in part by overseeing payments of hush money in exchange for non-disclosure agreements.

Precisely how those payments occurred and whether any crimes were committed in concealing them from auditors and shareholders were the central issues of Bharara’s Fox investigation. In March 2017, within weeks after he entered the Oval Office, Trump removed Bharara — a decision that aroused grave suspicions about the president’s motives. The next day, Bharara himself tweeted a disturbing hint at the reasons behind his dismissal, suggesting that he was getting too close to uncovering corruption in high places.

Nevertheless, Bharara’s deputy Joon Kim continued the Fox investigation, even after Ailes abruptly died in May 2017. Kim reportedly impanelled a grand jury in the case. And as late as the fall of 2017, federal prosecutors were bringing in former Fox employees for interviews about harassment and payoffs at the network. Among those reportedly brought in for questioning, after a subpoena was issued to him, was Shine.

By then, Trump was moving to nominate his own appointee as U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, a position long considered one of the crown jewels of the Justice Department. Following a personal interview he selected Geoffrey Berman, an attorney expressly recommended by Trump adviser Rudolph Giuliani, his former partner at the mammoth and highly political law firm of Greenberg Traurig. Berman’s appointment only raised fresh questions because the Greenberg firm had represented both Fox News and Ailes.

Sometime after Berman took over as U.S. Attorney, according to reports in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, his office’s investigation of Fox News apparently went “dormant.” No indictments or reports have issued from the grand jury. Neither the U.S. Attorney nor Fox has commented on its findings.

Meanwhile, three highly significant and related events had occurred:

In May 2017, Fox News fired Shine within days of Ailes’ death in May 2017.

In November 2017, Fox News’ parent corporation agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by shareholders who alleged that gross mismanagement had created a culture of sexual harassment that caused financial and reputational damage to the company. The $90 million settlement was one of the largest ever agreed in a shareholder derivative case — and the company’s rapid legal surrender raised severe doubts about the company’s claims of innocence.

In July 2018, over the July Fourth weekend, the Trump White House announced the appointment of Shine as deputy chief of staff in charge of communications.

Considering the sensitivity of Shine’s new position — and the previous failures of top Trump aides in vetting White House appointees — it seems important to determine what questions were posed to him during the Fox investigation and how he answered them. Of course Shine could release his own testimony, even if he appeared before the grand jury, but that seems about as likely as Trump releasing his tax returns.

And it is equally important to learn whether Berman, a former managing partner in a firm that represents the network, discontinued the Fox probe or whether he properly recused himself from that decision — as he was required to do when his office took over the investigation of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen from special counsel Robert Mueller.

Tomorrow: What Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance could do to restore transparency to this case.