Thread by @gabrielmalor

Bizarre attempt to rewrite the events of Berman's shady replacement, in which, because Berman resisted his firing-via-Twitter, he prevailed in having his strong right arm, Audrey Strauss, installed as acting US Att'y rather than let Barr pick an outsider to take over SDNY.

https://twitter.com/JonathanTurley/status/1296453603276861443

I mean, let us count the ways that Berman's replacement wasn't on the level.
(1) Berman finds out that he's agreed to resign in a tweet. (He hadn't.)
(2) Berman pushes back. So Barr offers him chairman of the SEC, an independent agency!

(3) Barr says Trump fired Berman.
(4) Trump tells the press had nothing to do with it.
(5) So later, Barr comes up with a letter saying that Trump really did fire Berman this time.
(6) But that means Audrey Strauss became acting USA rather than Craig Carpenito, Barr's choice.

A few weeks later, the folks with Trumpian brainrot, entirely without a whisper of evidence, suggest that SDNY wouldn't have got a grand jury to indict Ghislaine Maxwell if Berman had been at SDNY—even though, again, Berman prevailed in installing Strauss.

And lo, here we are today with Trump sycophants pointing to the Bannon indictment as evidence that Barr's farcically mismanaged attempts to replace Berman were totally cool and not at all giving the appearance of trying to disrupt SDNY's work.

BTW, in case that went by too fast, the stage at which eyebrows should have bounced off the ceiling is when, to get a reluctant Berman to aggree, AG Barr offered him chairmanship of the SEC, an independent agency nowhere within the AG's bailiwick.

Everything that came after that was just AG Barr failing around after he realized that Berman wasn't going to go for the scheme.

And that's why Audrey Strauss is running SDNY right now, and not Barr's outsider replacement.