Mr. Trump, meanwhile, kept tweeting. “Iran is being given VERY BAD advice by @JohnKerry,” he tweeted on the morning of April 22, 2019. “Major violation of the Logan Act?”
That afternoon, Mr. Berman said, one of the co-directors of the Southern District’s national security unit received a call from a Justice Department official asking why the office was delaying seeking a viewing warrant. review “header information”, such as the date, recipient and sender of Mr. Kerry’s electronic communications. A higher-ranking official pressed the matter again the next day with Southern District officials.
Mr. Berman writes that the pattern is “obvious – and outrageous.” He said the investigation began after Mr. Trump began tweeting “his displeasure with Kerry,” and a new tweet 11 months later gave further impetus.
“And they asked us, basically, what took so long? Why don’t you go faster and faster against this enemy of the president? Mr. Berman wrote.
A spokesman for Mr Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Berman said that after an investigation that lasted about a year, his office told the Justice Department that it would not prosecute Mr. Kerry.
A short time later, on September 19, 2019, Berman wrote, a senior adviser to the attorney general called to say that Mr. is expected to take the Kerry case to another US attorney’s office, this time in Maryland.
Mr. Berman wrote that that office reached the same conclusion as the Southern District had reached, “and the Kerry investigation just quietly died – as it should have.”
Alain Delaquérière contribution research.
