Sean Hannity that Barr had appointed U.S. attorney John Bash to investigate. She also stated that John Durham, whom Barr had appointed to investigate the origins of the FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation, had also been examining the unmasking issue. The Bash investigation was quietly closed five months later, with no public announcement or report, reportedly finding nothing improper. Bash's 52-page report, previously classified top secret, was released in May 2022. Bash wrote he had found no evidence that any unmasking requests were made for any political or otherwise improper reasons during the 2016 election period or the ensuing presidential transition. Barr's firing of Geoffrey Berman was widely condemned, given that the Southern District of New York was actively pursuing criminal investigations into several persons and companies associated with President Donald Trump and The Trump Organization. Barr's conduct was seen as sacrificing the independence of the Department of Justice to protect Trump and his allies. For these reasons, numerous groups have called for Barr's resignation, including the New York City Bar Association. Ethics complaints On October 3, 2019, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. filed ethics complaints against Barr with the District of Columbia Bar and Virginia Bar associations. On February 14, 2020, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed an ethics complaint against Barr with the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility and Office of the Inspector General, accusing Barr of "violating several Justice Department rules, guidelines and procedures". On July 22, 2020, a group of 27 "legal ethics experts and former government lawyers", including four former presidents of the District of Columbia Bar, also filed a complaint against Barr with the District of Columbia Bar. A bar association may take years to investigate an ethics complaint filed against a lawyer. If the District of Columbia Bar concludes that a lawyer has violated any of its Rules of Professional Conduct, that lawyer may be sanctioned in one of several ways, including admonition, suspension, and disbarment. Halkbank Investigation and the firing of Geoffrey Berman In June 2019, in violation of Department of Justice policy, Barr pressured Berman, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop an investigation into close allies of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan involved with the Turkish bank Halkbank. The bank and the individuals in question were alleged to have broken U.S. sanctions on Iran, funnelling billions of dollars to Iran and helping