Barry Berke put his corporate law career on hold to weave together the strands of impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee. Barry Berke had a complicated case on his hands. His client, SAC Capital Advisors fund manager Michael Steinberg, had been arrested for insider trading. The bespectacled, Harvard-educated attorney had to distill a complex set of facts into a simple argument infused with certainty. “Caught in the crossfire of aggressive investigations of others, there is no basis for even the slightest blemish on his spotless reputation,” Berke told the press. A jury convicted Steinberg, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, but the charges were tossed out on appeal, in part because of Berke’s ability to make the case that the government’s prosecution, via a chain of informants, was overzealous. Now, U.S. House Democrats are counting on Berke to weave together the strands of evidence for a compelling narrative about a much different aggressive government action. The goal: to impeach the president of the United States. |