In the end, due to legal issues related to Mr. Berman’s appointment, Mr. Barr was forced to ask Mr. Trump to fire him. He also pulled out of his plan for temporary succession and installed Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, to head the office for now.
Berman’s dismissal also came at a time when Trump had been expelling other administration officials with some degree of independence, including inspectors-generals tasked with eradicating fraud and agency abuse.
On Thursday, Mr. Donoghue, the US attorney in the Eastern District of New York, notified his office that he would resign to become a Justice Department official in Washington, according to people familiar with the matter.
The position he will assume, the Associate Chief Deputy Attorney General, who works for Mr. Rosen, is considered extremely influential, as Mr. Rosen’s office oversees the offices of the nation’s federal prosecutors. A previous official on paper, Edward O’Callaghan, was best known for overseeing the day-to-day of the Russia investigation.
The work is particularly critical of Mr. Rosen, who has never been a prosecutor.
DuCharme, who is Rosen’s current principal deputy, will return to the Brooklyn office where he had worked his entire career as a prosecutor before coming to Washington last year to advise Mr. Barr on criminal and national security matters.
Berman will testify just a week after two Justice Department attorneys told the House Judiciary Committee that political appointees in the Washington prosecutor’s office and in the antitrust division had intervened in investigations to advance the personal interests of the Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr.
Aaron SJ Zelinsky, a prosecutor who worked on the investigation of Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s old friend, told the committee that senior officials from the United States Attorney’s office in Washington demanded a further prison sentence. indulgent to Mr. Stone “due to politics.”
