In June 2019, in violation of Department of Justice policy, Barr pressured Berman, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop an investigation into close allies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan involved with the Turkish bank Halkbank. The bank and the individuals in question were alleged to have broken U.S. sanctions on Iran, funnelling billions of dollars to Iran and helping fund its nuclear ambitions. Barr's demand followed a concerted pressure campaign by Erdogan and his close associates, including his son-in-law, Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, and Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, a Trump family friend involved in developing the Trump towers in Turkey; Erdogan himself personally insisted to President Trump that the Halkbank investigation be shut down on at least two occasions, November 1, 2018, at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, and on a telephone call on December 14, 2018. According to former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a first-hand witness of many of the events in question, this sequence of events "does look like obstruction of justice". In a late Friday night statement on June 19, 2020, Barr stated that Berman was resigning and being replaced by Jay Clayton, citing Berman's behavior in the Halkbank episode as a primary reason for his removal. Berman learned of this through press reports and declined to resign; the next day, Barr asked Trump to fire Berman, which he promptly did. Berman was replaced by his deputy, Audrey Strauss. In November 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani figured in an SDNY investigation into multiple possible felonies.
