Palace, Met and Government stonewalled me over contacting Andrew, says US prosecutor
THE former top prosecutor in New York who pursued Prince Andrew over his links to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has accused the British establishment of ‘protecting’ the duke.
In a bombshell memoir published just days before the Queen’s funeral, Geoffrey Berman said he got ‘absolutely nowhere’ with his efforts to get her second son to agree to an interview as part of the wideranging Epstein investigation.
Mr Berman, the former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, writes that despite Andrew’s public assertion he was ‘willing to help any appropriate law enforcement agency’, Buckingham Palace was ‘not helpful’ and Andrew’s lawyers gave him the ‘runaround’.
He claims Scotland Yard were of no use when he formally requested assistance even though they were usually cooperative.
Earlier this year, the Duke of York paid a multimillion pound settlement to Virginia Roberts, who sued the prince over claims he slept with her three times when she was 17.
The out-of-court agreement accepted no liability and Andrew, who met Epstein through the financier’s madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, has always strongly rejected claims of wrongdoing.
But the sordid saga saw him forced to retreat from public life and stripped of his military titles and royal patronages by the Queen.
Mr Berman was in office for over two years before, in June 2020, he was fired by Donald Trump, whose inner circle he had been investigating. The duke’s sparring with the prosecutor began in November 2019 when Andrew said he would cooperate with law enforcement in a now infamous Newsnight interview.
But Mr Berman wrote that he became frustrated after, on the back of the public pledge, he asked his team to set up an interview with Andrew.
They spent ‘two weeks just trying to find out who his lawyers were’, Mr Berman says in Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department.
He writes: ‘We tried calling Buckingham Palace and they were not helpful. We tried the Department of Justice attache and the State Department, no luck.
‘When we finally got his lawyers, they had all these questions.’
He added: ‘We kept answering, and all that led to further questions.’ Mr Berman writes that it was an ‘endless email exchange and it was clear we were getting the runaround’.
In January 2020 Mr Berman was asked at a press conference about Andrew’s help in the investigation.
He said there had been ‘zero cooperation’. Mr Berman’s comments brought Andrew’s lawyers ‘to the table again’. He writes: ‘But it was more of the same. Repetitive emails back and forth with no commitment.’
A war of words ensued and Andrew’s lawyers accused Mr Berman of ‘seeking publicity rather than accepting the assistance proffered’ in a June 2020 statement.
Mr Berman writes: ‘ Prince Andrew clearly knew Epstein and Maxwell... We had a lot of questions for him and as of the day I was fired, those questions remained unanswered.’
Representatives for the duke declined to comment last night.