Khuzami’s departure, announced Friday by Geoffrey S. Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, comes even as his office’s investigation into Trump’s inner circle continues on multiple fronts. Berman will appoint his senior counsel, Audrey Strauss, to replace Khuzami as deputy U.S. attorney.
A public face of investigations that pose potential threats to Trump’s presidency, Khuzami, 62, has told colleagues that his departure is for personal reasons and unrelated to any political pressure. The announcement came as special counsel Robert Mueller wrapped up his nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Unlike Mueller, Khuzami has not faced personal and public ridicule from Trump. Registered as nonpartisan, Khuzami has served during Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation as a straight shooter.
The Southern District of New York, as the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan is known, has long displayed independence from the Justice Department in Washington, prosecuting politicians of all political stripes. The office’s reputation for autonomy earned it a nickname: “the Sovereign District” of New York.
Khuzami’s decision to leave the U.S. attorney’s office caps a consequential 15-month tenure as Berman’s deputy; most notably, he oversaw the investigation into hush money payments made during the 2016 campaign to two women who had said they had affairs with Trump.
Cohen pleaded guilty in that case and is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence in May.
Berman, who was appointed in January 2018 by the Trump administration, made Khuzami his first hire. A prosecutor in the same office earlier in his career, Khuzami assumed responsibility for the Cohen investigation after Berman was recused from the case for undisclosed reasons.
With Khuzami’s departure, Strauss would assume oversight of any remaining aspects of the Cohen investigation that were subject to Berman’s recusal; she would not come to the Cohen case cold, as she has been working with Khuzami on the investigation. Craig A. Stewart, a former Southern District prosecutor now at the law firm Arnold & Porter, will become Berman’s chief counsel.
Khuzami’s plans were unclear. He had bounced between the private sector and government service for years. In taking the job as deputy U.S. attorney, Khuzami left behind a lucrative partnership at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, where he has lived even while commuting to New York. He had told friends that he had always planned to return home to his family this year, and Berman said Friday that Khuzami would return to Washington.
After putting himself through college by working odd jobs as a dishwasher and overnight dockworker, Khuzami has had a number of brushes with power, both in the places he worked and the people he prosecuted.
In his earlier Southern District stint, in the 1990s, Khuzami cut his teeth as a terrorism and financial crimes prosecutor. In perhaps his biggest case, Khuzami helped secure the conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman and other conspirators in a plot to blow up New York City landmarks.
In 2002, he joined Deutsche Bank, where he ultimately became general counsel for the firm’s American arm. He left in 2009, during the Obama administration, to run the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, where he sued Goldman Sachs over financial crisis-era misconduct.
In his role as deputy U.S. attorney over the past 15 months, Khuzami has overseen several investigations that Berman was recused from, but none was more prominent than Cohen’s case, which burst into public view in April 2018 when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room.
Four months later, Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, including for paying $130,000 to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an affair she said she had with Trump. Khuzami’s prosecutors argued that the payment was an excessive contribution to Trump’s campaign, noting that Daniels’ silence bolstered his election chances and that campaign finance law caps individual donations to a presidential candidate in the general election at $2,700.
In seeking a stiff sentence for Cohen, Khuzami’s prosecutors contended in a court filing that “he acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump. The president later suggested that Khuzami’s prosecutors used the case against Cohen to embarrass him.
Even with Khuzami’s departure, the Southern District is expected to continue its investigation into the hush money payments.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.