LOCALmatters
A Former Leahy Aide Steers the Mueller Probe B Y PAUL HEI N TZ
SEVENDAYSVT.COM 04.25.18-05.02.18 SEVEN DAYS 20 LOCAL MATTERS
THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
O
verseeing the most important legal proceeding in America — the grand jury probe of President Donald Trump’s Russian connections — is a little-known federal judge with ties to Vermont who spent a decade advising Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Though Trump hasn’t tweeted about her yet, Judge Beryl Howell could shape the future of his presidency. According to friends and former colleagues, she’s just the woman for the job. “She’s a straight shooter,” said former Leahy chief of staff Ed Pagano, who worked alongside Howell on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “I can’t think of anyone who would be fairer than her on the bench.” Two months after his appointment last May as special counsel, Robert Mueller impaneled a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to investigate alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential obstruction of justice by the president. As chief judge of D.C.’s federal district court, it fell to Howell to referee the process. (Other aspects of the Trump probe, including a grand jury Mueller has used in Virginia and a New York-based investigation of the president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, fall outside of her jurisdiction.) Federal prosecutors typically use grand juries to gather evidence in an investigation, by compelling witnesses to testify, and then seek indictments. But because grand juries operate in secret, not much is known about Howell’s exact role in the Mueller probe. Only a handful of news stories have mentioned her by name, and some friends said they had no idea she was involved. There are some clues about Howell’s influence over the matter. In a 37-page opinion issued last October and unsealed weeks later, Howell ruled that a lawyer for former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, could be forced to appear before the grand jury. “When a person uses the attorneyclient relationship to further a criminal scheme, the law is well established that a claim of attorney-client or work-product privilege must yield to the grand jury’s investigatory needs,” Howell wrote.
Judge Beryl Howell
Though the 61-year-old judge has lived in D.C. and New York City for most of her career, she has spent considerable time in Vermont since at least the mid-1990s. She and her husband, Michael Rosenfeld, own a vacation home in Leicester, where she has been involved in the Lake Dunmore/Fern Lake Association. Rosenfeld, a documentary filmmaker and producer, serves on the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ board of trustees. Hinesburg writer Bill Schubart, who chairs the VCFA board, has spent time with Howell, Rosenfeld and their three children during their trips to Vermont over the past two decades. “She’s just very down-to-earth, extremely intelligent,” Schubart said of the judge. That doesn’t mean he has any insight into the Mueller probe. “I know enough not to ask Beryl anything about her work, and she knows enough not to say anything about it,” Schubart said.
Born on a U.S. Army base in Georgia, Howell grew up in a military family that frequently relocated, according to longtime friend Beth Wilkinson, a D.C. trial lawyer. Howell graduated from Columbia Law School in 1983 and, four years later, landed a career-defining job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. EDNY was stocked at the time with legal standouts, including future attorney general Loretta Lynch, future Department of Justice criminal chief Leslie Caldwell and a future prosecutor in Mueller’s Office of the Special Counsel, Andrew Weissmann. “She was incredibly talented,” Wilkinson said of Howell, with whom she worked in the Brooklyn office. “We all looked up to her.” As deputy chief of the Narcotics Section, Howell led the prosecution of Colombia’s Cali Cartel and a violent Chinatown gang known as the Flying Dragons. According to Wilkinson, Howell was pregnant when she took
POLITICS
the latter case to trial and, upon delivering her closing statement, went straight to the hospital to give birth. Leahy, a former county prosecutor, marveled at her record years later during her judicial confirmation hearings. “Descriptions of her cases read like crime novels,” he said in 2010. In 1993, Howell went to work for the Vermont senator, advising him at first on technology and antitrust issues — and later, as general counsel on his Judiciary Committee staff, on the impeachment of president Bill Clinton and passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. “It is hard to think of anything that she hasn’t been involved in,” Leahy said in a 2003 committee meeting as Howell was preparing to leave the Senate. Leahy and many of Howell’s former colleagues declined to comment for this story, as did the judge herself. Some expressed the fear that, as a former Leahy aide, she could be targeted for abuse by Trump, who has incorrectly asserted that his legal adversaries are all Democrats.