Judge orders all federal prosecutors in Manhattan to read opinion on withholding evidence

[sl8]

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/16/sdny-prosecutors-iran-sanctions-violations-416338

Judge orders all federal prosecutors in Manhattan to read opinion on withholding evidence

U.S. District Court Judge Allison Nathan's ruling was related to a criminal case involving alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.

[soothsayer]

1. Geoffrey Berman was a bit of a schnook

Snip

Departing from the Trump administration in a blaze of glory and harsh words for one’s former masters (and, preferably, a book deal) has been the quickest way to go from sworn enemy of what is good and right and decent to a perceived champion thereof, whatever one’s former crimes against the republic and its citizens. So it was with Geoffrey Berman, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who caused enough of a fuss on his way out to earn the title Hero of the Pearl-Clutching Moderate Left and ensure that, whatever threats against it Attorney General Bill Barr made, he’ll have a perfectly lucrative and secure career in retirement from federal service. It’s no matter that it seems—even in his own words—that Berman was pushed out not because of his prosecution of the president’s former lawyer or in an effort to obstruct the investigation into the president’s current lawyer (who after all happens to be a former law partner of one Geoffrey Berman), but in a typically Trumpian hamfisted effort to find a new job for a presidential golfing buddy without actually checking with all parties involved. Nor does it matter that Berman was Trump’s handpicked choice (not that he ever bothered to get around to actually nominating him) to replace another fired Manhattan U.S. Attorney, one who probably did actually pose a threat to the corruption and graft and self-dealing that Trump was planning, to the extent that one can call anything the president does “planned.”

This reverse Midas touch also has a handy way of obscuring the fact—also irrelevant to their firings—that such people are often as incompetent and inept as the president himself. And so it is with the now-sainted Berman, whose office was apparently either so unable to perform even the basic legal obligation of discovery or so infected by the ideas of Trump and Barr as to assume it did not have to disclose anything it didn’t want to that first a convicted violator of Iranian sanctions and now a convicted screwer-overer of another reformed Trumpkin may go free.

https://dealbreaker.com/2020/07/sdny-incompetence-may-set-hedge-funder-free