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    Scores of N.Y.C. Public Housing Workers Charged in Record Corruption Case

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    Manhattan’s federal prosecutor said the number of bribery charges, more than 60 in all, amounted to a single-day record for the Justice Department.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged more than 60 current and former employees of the New York City Housing Authority with bribery and extortion, a sweeping indictment of a troubled organization.The unsealing of the complaints was announced early Tuesday, with additional details on the scope of the investigation to be unveiled by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, at a late morning news conference.The defendants were charged with “accepting cash payments from contractors in exchange for awarding NYCHA contracts,” a news release said. It added that the more than 60 federal bribery charges amounted to a single-day record for the Department of Justice.Last year, officials at the housing agency estimated that it would need some $78 billion over the next two decades to renovate the aging system, which is home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in an expensive city starved for affordable apartments. Complaints about aging buildings, rodents, leaky pipes and broken elevators have dogged the agency, which operates more than 270 developments.In 2022, NYCHA collected just 65 percent of the rent it charged, the lowest percentage in its nearly 100-year history.This is a developing story and will be updated. More

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      Few of Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Defend Justice Dept. Independence

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      The evolution of the Republican Party under the influence of former President Donald J. Trump calls into question a post-Watergate norm.Donald J. Trump has promised that if he wins back the presidency he will appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.But he’s not the only Republican running for president who appears to be abandoning a long-established norm in Washington — presidents keeping their hands out of specific Justice Department investigations and prosecutions.Mr. Trump, who leads the G.O.P. field by around 30 percentage points in public national polls, wields such powerful influence that only a few of his Republican rivals are willing to clearly say presidents should not interfere in such Justice Department decisions.After Mr. Trump’s vow to direct the Justice Department to appoint a “real” prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, The New York Times asked each of his Republican rivals questions aimed at laying out what limits, if any, they believed presidents must or should respect when it comes to White House interference with federal law enforcement decisions.Their responses reveal a party that has turned so hard against federal law enforcement that it is no longer widely considered good politics to clearly answer in the negative a question that was once uncontroversial: Do you believe presidents should get involved in the investigations and prosecutions of individuals?Mr. Trump’s closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has flatly said he does not believe the Justice Department is independent from the White House as a matter of law, while leaving it ambiguous where he stands on the issue of presidents getting involved in investigation decisions.Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman, Bryan Griffin, wrote in an email that comments the governor made on a recent policy call “should be instructive to your reporting.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said the president can lawfully exert more direct control over the Justice Department and F.B.I. than has traditionally been the case.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn the comments, Mr. DeSantis says that “the fundamental insight” he gleans from the Constitution is that the Justice Department and F.B.I. are not “independent” from the White House and that the president can lawfully exert more direct control over them than traditionally has been the case.“I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”But the context of Mr. DeSantis’s remarks was mostly about a president firing political appointees and bureaucrats at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., not about a president ordering them to target specific people with investigations and prosecutions. Mr. Griffin did not respond when asked in a follow-up on this point.Mr. Trump has portrayed his legal troubles as stemming from politicization, although there is no evidence Mr. Biden directed Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Mr. Trump. Under Mr. Garland, Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and on Tuesday secured a guilty plea from Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, on tax charges.Especially since Watergate, there has been an institutional tradition of Justice Department independence from White House control. The idea is that while a president can set broad policies — directing the Justice Department to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes, for example — he or she should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions except in rare cases affecting foreign policy.This is particularly seen as true for cases involving a president’s personal or political interests, such as an investigation into himself or his political opponents.But even in his first term, Mr. Trump increasingly pressed against that notion.William P. Barr, left, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn the spring of 2018, Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and James B. Comey Jr., the former head of the F.B.I. Mr. McGahn rebuffed him, saying the president had no authority to order an investigation, according to two people familiar with the conversation.Later in 2018, Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into officials involved in the Russia investigation. The following year, Attorney General William P. Barr indeed assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John Durham, to investigate the investigators — styling it as an administrative review because there was no factual predicate to open a formal criminal investigation.Mr. Trump also said in 2018 and 2019 that John F. Kerry, the Obama-era secretary of state, should be prosecuted for illegally interfering with American diplomacy by seeking to preserve a nuclear accord with Iran. Geoffrey S. Berman, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan whom Mr. Trump fired in 2020, later wrote in his memoir that the Trump Justice Department pressured him to find a way to charge Mr. Kerry, but he closed the investigation after about a year without bringing any charges.And as the 2020 election neared, Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham to file charges against high-level former officials even though the prosecutor had not found a factual basis to justify any. In his own memoir, Mr. Barr wrote that the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” eroded their relationship even before Mr. Barr refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.Where Mr. Trump’s first-term efforts were scattered and haphazard, key allies — including Jeffrey B. Clark, a former Justice Department official who helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election — have been developing a blueprint to make the department in any second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control.Against that backdrop, Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the long-shot G.O.P. challengers, has pledged to pardon Mr. Trump if Mr. Ramaswamy wins the presidency. He said that as a constitutional matter, he thinks a president does have the power to direct prosecutors to open or close specific criminal investigations. But he added that “the president must exercise this judgment with prudence in a manner that respects the rule of law in the country.”Vivek Ramaswamy said he would respect the post-Watergate norm regarding Justice Department independence.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAsked if he would pledge, regardless of his views on what the law may technically allow presidents to do, to obey the post-Watergate norm, Mr. Ramaswamy replied: “As a general norm, yes.”Two Republican candidates who are both former U.S. attorneys unequivocally stated that presidents should not direct the investigations or prosecutions of individuals. Tellingly, both are chasing votes from anti-Trump moderate Republicans.Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor who was a U.S. attorney in the George W. Bush administration, said he knew “just how important it is to keep prosecutors independent and let them do their jobs.”“No president should be meddling in Department of Justice investigations or cases in any way,” Mr. Christie added. “The best way to keep that from happening is with a strong attorney general who can lead without fear or favor.”And Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and congressman who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration, said that “preserving an independent and politically impartial Department of Justice in terms of specific investigations is essential for the rule of law and paramount in rebuilding trust with the American people.”A spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence, Devin O’Malley, was terse. He said a president could remove senior law enforcement officials and expressed some support for Justice Department independence. But he declined to add further comment when pressed.“Mike Pence believes that the president of the United States has the ability to hire and fire the attorney general, the F.B.I. director, and other D.O.J. officials — and has, in fact, pledged to do so if elected — but also believes the D.O.J. has a certain level of independence with regard to prosecutorial matters,” Mr. O’Malley said.Mr. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, through a spokesman, expressed some support for Justice Department independence.John Tully for The New York TimesMost other candidates running against Mr. Trump landed in what they apparently deemed to be a politically safer space of blending general comments about how justice should be administered impartially with vague accusations that the Biden-era Justice Department had targeted Republicans for political reasons.Many did not specifically point to a basis for those accusations. Among a broad swath of conservatives, it is taken as a given that the F.B.I. and Justice Department must be politically motivated against them on a variety of fronts, including the scrutiny over the 2016 Trump campaign’s links to Russia, the prosecution of people who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the Trump documents case.Matt Gorman, a senior communications adviser for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, declined to say whether or not Mr. Scott believed presidents should interfere in specific investigations. He pointed only to Mr. Scott’s comments on the most recent “Fox News Sunday” appearance.In those remarks, Mr. Scott said: “We have to clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J. Today, we want to know that in our justice system, Lady Justice wears a blindfold and that all Americans will be treated fairly by Lady Justice. But today, this D.O.J. continues to hunt Republicans while they protect Democrats.”Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, also provided an ambiguous answer through her spokeswoman, Chaney Denton. She pointed to two specific conservative grievances with law enforcement: Seven years ago, Hillary Clinton was not charged over using a private email server while secretary of state, and the Trump-era special counsel, Mr. Durham, wrote a report this year criticizing the Russia inquiry.“The Department of Justice should be impartial, but unfortunately it is not today,” Ms. Denton said. “The Durham Report, the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton, and other actions make it clear that a partisan double standard is being applied. The answer is not to have both parties weaponize the Justice Department; it’s to have neither side do it.”“The Department of Justice should be impartial,” a spokeswoman for Nikki Haley said, without getting into specifics.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhen specifically pressed, Ms. Denton declined to say whether Ms. Haley believes presidents should get involved in prosecutions or investigations of individuals.One recent entrant to the race, Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, disavowed the post-Watergate norm, putting forward a premise that law enforcement officials are currently politically biased and so his White House interference would be to correct that purported state of affairs.“I certainly would not promise that I would allow a biased department operate independently,” he said in part of a statement. “I believe it is the president’s responsibility to insist that justice is delivered fairly without bias or political influence.”A spokesman for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Lance Trover, was even more vague.“Gov. Burgum believes that citizens’ faith in our institutions is the foundation of a free and just society and will not allow them to be a political enforcement extension of the party in power as we have seen in failed countries,” he said. “If Americans have distrust in the Justice Department when he takes office, he will do what it takes to restore the American people’s faith in the Department of Justice and other bedrocks of our democracy.” More

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      Ex-U.S. Attorney’s Book Addresses Pressure to Help Trump Causes

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      Geoffrey S. Berman, who headed the Manhattan office, says in a book the Justice Department pushed cases, against John Kerry and others, to help Mr. Trump.A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump sought to use the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Mr. Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry.The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for two and a half years until June 2020, when Mr. Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by Attorney General William P. Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration ally.A copy of Mr. Berman’s book, “Holding the Line,” was obtained by The New York Times before its scheduled publication Tuesday.The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District declined to act.The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran.And in September 2018, Mr. Berman writes, two months before the November midterms, a senior department official called Mr. Berman’s deputy, cited the Southern District’s recent prosecutions of two prominent Trump loyalists, and bluntly asserted that the office, which had been investigating Gregory B. Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, should charge him — and should do so before Election Day.“It’s time for you guys to even things out,” the official said, according to Mr. Berman.The book comes as Mr. Trump and his supporters have accused the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland of using the Justice Department as a weapon after a judge authorized FBI agents to search his Florida house for missing classified records. Mr. Trump, who is a likely presidential candidate in 2024, has suggested without evidence that President Biden is playing a role in that investigation.However, Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.In the book, Mr. Berman, who as U.S. attorney did not give news interviews, offers new details about the high-profile prosecutions of defendants like Mr. Cohen; Chris Collins, a Republican congressman from New York; Michael Avenatti, the celebrity attorney and Trump antagonist; and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.He says there were cases his office pursued without pressure from Washington, but in others, he makes clear his greatest challenges did not always have to do with the law.“Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Mr. Berman, 62, writes, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining — in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”“I walked this tightrope for two and a half years,” writes Mr. Berman, who is now in private practice. “Eventually, the rope snapped.”Geoffrey S. Berman, fired as U.S. attorney, said he was naïve about President Trump’s fierce desire to pursue his critics. Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Berman, who in the book describes himself as a Rockefeller Republican, had been a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan office from 1990 to 1994, and went on to become a co-managing partner of the New Jersey office of the law firm Greenberg Traurig.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsNumerous inquiries. More

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      Former U.S. Attorney Says Trump Wanted to Fire Him For Not Backing Election Fraud Claims

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      Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that his abrupt resignation in January had been prompted by Justice Department officials’ warning that President Donald J. Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia, according to a person familiar with his testimony.Mr. Pak, who provided more than three hours of closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, stepped down with no notice on Jan. 4, saying that he had done his best “to be thoughtful and consistent, and to provide justice for my fellow citizens in a fair, effective and efficient manner.”While he did not discuss Mr. Trump’s role in his decision to resign at the time, he told the Senate panel that the president had been dismayed that Mr. Pak had investigated allegations of voter fraud in Fulton County, Ga., and not found evidence to support them, according to the person familiar with the statements.Mr. Pak testified that top department officials had made clear that Mr. Trump intended to fire him over his refusal to say that the results in Georgia had been undermined by voter fraud, the person said. Resigning would pre-empt a public dismissal.He also described work done by state officials and the F.B.I. to vet Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud, and said they had not found evidence to support those allegations.The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining Mr. Pak’s departure as part of its broader investigation into the final weeks of the Trump administration and the White House’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to falsely assert that the election was corrupt. The Justice Department’s inspector general is also looking at Mr. Pak’s resignation.During a phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia on Jan. 2, two days before Mr. Pak resigned, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to find enough votes to reverse the state’s presidential election results and described fraud allegations that Mr. Raffensperger said were not supported by facts, according to leaked audio of the call.Mr. Pak had refused to support similar election fraud claims because of the lack of evidence, according to two people familiar with his investigation. “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger during their phone call.Audio of that call was leaked to The Washington Post on Sunday, Jan. 3, just hours before Mr. Trump met with top Justice Department officials to discuss the possibility of replacing the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, with Jeffrey Clark, a department leader who was willing to falsely tell Georgia officials that fraud might have affected the election outcome.While Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark argued at the meeting about which man should lead the Justice Department and whether the department should intervene in Georgia, Mr. Trump interjected with complaints about the department’s official conclusion that the state election results were valid, according to three people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Trump ultimately decided not to elevate Mr. Clark, and the department did not send Georgia officials a letter seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s win.Immediately after the Sunday evening meeting in the Oval Office, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Richard P. Donoghue, sent an email to Mr. Pak at 10:09 p.m. that said, “Please call ASAP,” according to documents that the House Oversight and Reform Committee obtained from the Justice Department and released in June.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Justice Dept. to Keep Special Counsel Investigating Russia Inquiry

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Dept. to Keep Special Counsel Investigating Russia InquiryJohn H. Durham will remain as special counsel even as the Biden administration requests a mass resignation of U.S. attorneys. The prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes will also remain.The Justice Department will begin to ask dozens of remaining Trump-era U.S. attorneys to resign on Tuesday.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFeb. 9, 2021Updated 8:03 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department will allow John H. Durham to remain in the role of special counsel appointed to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry, even after he relinquishes his role as the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, according to a senior Justice Department official.Mr. Durham is expected to step down as the U.S. attorney in Connecticut as early as Tuesday, when the Biden administration will begin to ask dozens of Trump-era U.S. attorneys who have not already quit to submit their resignations, the official said Monday.All of the remaining U.S. attorneys appointed by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed by the Senate will be asked to tender their resignations except for David C. Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware who is overseeing the tax fraud investigation into President Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson called Mr. Weiss on Monday evening and asked him to remain in office, according to the official.It is common for new presidents to replace U.S. attorneys en masse, and the request for resignations has long been expected. But Mr. Durham’s and Mr. Weiss’s investigations had created delicate situations for the Biden administration, which is seeking to restore the Justice Department’s image of impartiality.It is not clear exactly when the resignations, 56 in all, will take effect, or when their replacements can be confirmed by the Senate. The resignations were reported earlier by CNN.The confirmation hearing for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Mr. Biden’s nominee for attorney general, is not expected to begin for two weeks, according to a person briefed on the matter. The process has been slowed by the tumultuous transition from the Trump administration and by the second impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, which begins on Tuesday.Since the spring of 2019, Mr. Durham has been investigating whether any Obama administration officials broke the law when they examined the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Feb. 9, 2021, 9:53 a.m. ETBiden will spend the day focused on the stimulus package and his push to increase the minimum wage to $15.Conservative media, the apparatus that fed Trump’s power, is facing a test, too.Trump’s trial is expected to be brief but may have lasting political repercussions.Both Mr. Trump and the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, had publicly said they were certain that Mr. Durham would uncover grave offenses, if not outright criminal behavior, that supported the idea that the Russia investigation was a plot created to sabotage Mr. Trump.But Mr. Durham never lived up to their expectations. The only criminal case Mr. Durham has brought was against Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former lower-level F.B.I. lawyer, who falsified information in an email from the C.I.A. that the bureau used to renew a wiretap order that targeted Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign aide. In the weeks before the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his supporters expressed outrage that the Durham inquiry had not produced anything useful to Mr. Trump’s campaign efforts.In October, Mr. Barr secretly appointed Mr. Durham to serve as special counsel to continue his work. The move gave Mr. Durham independence from a possible Biden administration and made it very difficult for a new attorney general to end his investigation, all but ensuring the Durham inquiry would live on after Mr. Trump left office.“In advance of the presidential election, I decided to appoint Mr. Durham as a special counsel to provide him and his team with the assurance that they could complete their work, without regard to the outcome of the election,” Mr. Barr wrote in a letter that he submitted to Congress in December.Dozens of Mr. Trump’s U.S. attorneys have already resigned, in the weeks before and after the election, leaving those offices in the hands of acting officials. While Mr. Durham and several more U.S. attorneys are expected to join them this week, that cohort will not include the leaders of the largest, most prominent federal prosecutor’s offices: Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who was appointed to her position by the courts, and Michael R. Sherwin, the U.S. attorney in Washington, who is an acting official and was not confirmed by the Senate.Both Ms. Strauss and Mr. Sherwin were elevated to their roles amid upheaval and controversy that stemmed from Mr. Barr’s handling of politically delicate cases involving Mr. Trump.Ms. Strauss was made the acting U.S. attorney after her boss, Geoffrey S. Berman, angered the White House with his handling of cases against Mr. Trump’s associates and ultimately refused to leave when Mr. Barr tried to replace him. The standoff between the two men ended when Mr. Barr allowed Ms. Strauss, a registered Democrat, to lead the office. Federal judges in her district, exercising a rarely used power, formally appointed her to the position in December.Mr. Sherwin was tapped to lead the Washington office after his predecessor was removed amid a contentious decision by Mr. Barr to force prosecutors to lower a sentencing recommendation for one of Mr. Trump’s allies, Roger J. Stone Jr. Mr. Sherwin has since emerged as the face of the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.Mr. Sherwin could remain at the department to work on the Capitol riots investigation, even after the administration nominates a new U.S. attorney, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More