Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Geoffrey Berman, Interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York
As the news broke yesterday that the office, home and hotel room of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had been raided yesterday by the FBI, CNN was ferociously soliciting opinions from a myriad of folks on why Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not overseen the raid but had simply made a referral to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) which oversaw the raid. No one had any concrete answers for CNN.
For years, Wall Street On Parade has been documenting and reporting on how the Federal courts and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York function as a protection racket for Wall Street. For decades, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY has been populating itself through a gold-plated revolving door to Wall Street’s biggest and coziest law firms. This ensures that Wall Street’s darkest secrets never see too much sunshine in the court of public opinion and that Wall Street’s titans never see the inside of a jail cell. (See related articles below for an in-depth understanding of the problem.)
According to CNN reporting, the Michael Cohen law office that was raided was located at the global corporate law firm of Squire Patton Boggs. The 1500-lawyer firm had announced a “strategic alliance” with Cohen in April of last year, a few months after Trump’s inauguration. When queried about the raid by news media yesterday, Squire Patton Boggs said that its relationship with Cohen is over, without commenting on why Cohen still has an office there.
According to Legal Week, Squire Patton Boggs is advising Cambridge Analytica on the U.K.’s investigation into its harvesting of data from Facebook and its potential role in manipulating voters in the Brexit vote that took the U.K. out of the European Union. Cambridge Analytica is also under investigation in the U.S. by the Federal Trade Commission for harvesting data from Facebook without users’ permission and potentially using that data to assist the Trump campaign. Trump’s major donor, Robert Mercer, funded Cambridge Analytica. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, will testify today and tomorrow before the U.S. Senate and House, respectively, on how Cambridge Analytica and others harvested its users’ personal data without the users’ permission.
The man currently in charge of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has not been vetted or confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He’s serving as an interim U.S. Attorney. His name is Geoffrey Berman and he is a Trump supporter. Federal Election Commission records show that he donated $5400 to Trump’s campaign on July 28, 2016. At the time of his appointment, Berman was also a fellow shareholder and law partner of Rudy Giuliani at the giant law firm, Greenberg Traurig. Berman had worked there for more than a decade. Giuliani is a longstanding Trump ally and loyalist and a former head himself of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY.
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