#Ousted US Attorney Geoffrey Berman to testify before House panel

Geoffrey Berman, the ousted US attorney for the Southern District of New York who was leading probes into President Trump’s allies, is scheduled to appear in a closed-door meeting Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee.

Last month, Berman was engaged in an extraordinary standoff with Attorney General William Barr, who sought to have him leave office — and agreed to step down only after being assured his office’s investigations of the president’s inner circle would continue.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called Berman’s ouster “part of a clear and dangerous pattern” of behavior by Barr.

The panel’s Democratic majority is pursuing a probe of the AG, who they claim operates more like the president’s personal attorney than the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Barr also is expected to testify before the committee later this month.

At the SDNY, Berman oversaw several ongoing probes of the president’s associates, including some who featured prominently in Trump’s House impeachment inquiry.

The office is also looking into the business dealings of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. It also has prosecuted the president’s former fixer Michael Cohen, who was imprisoned for lying to Congress and campaign finance crimes.

Berman — a Republican lawyer and Trump donor — had worked from 1987 to 1990 for the independent counsel who investigated the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair.

He was tapped by the White House in 2018 as the US attorney for SDNY.

The effort to boot Berman sparked an unusual clash between the Justice Department and the SDNY.

Barr announced late on a Friday that Berman was stepping down — but the US attorney later issued his own statement saying he had “no intention of resigning” and showed up for work the next morning.

Barr then announced Berman’s firing and Trump told reporters it was “all up to the attorney general.”

“I wasn’t involved,” he said.

Earlier on that Friday, Barr met with Berman in New York and offered him a new job leading the Justice Department’s civil division in Washington — one of the department’s top roles — and floated the possibility of him replacing Jay Clayton as SEC chairman. Clayton’s name had been announced as Berman’s replacement in the US Attorney’s Office.

Berman had not been presidentially nominated as US attorney and was instead serving in a temporary capacity as a judicial appointee since early 2018.

With Post wires