(CN) — In a mirror image drama of a shake-up that occurred three weeks earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the sudden replacement of a powerful federal prosecutor in New York with an associate of Attorney General Bill Barr.
Only instead of occurring in the Southern District of New York, the top prosecutor of its sister jurisdiction in Brooklyn was replaced in a proverbial Friday night news dump.
And instead of defiantly refusing to leave his post, ex-U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue accepted a promotion to Main Justice, where he and Barr’s now-former Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Seth DuCharme will trade places.
Why Barr has been busily ousting U.S. Attorneys in New York City has been a subject of intense debate and speculation. Several criminal probes and prosecutions in Manhattan have rankled as a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, from the campaign-finance crimes of the president’s former fixer Michael Cohen to the impeachment-related allegations against Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas.
As Trump’s Senate trial played out in February, Politico reported that Donoghue had been in charge of vetting and managing all Ukraine-related efforts. His district reportedly had been heading an investigation into Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant who headed the president’s inauguration committee and whose fundraising for that event allegedly caught the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.
