WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Justice threatened to strike Straus Professor of Business Administration Max H. Bazerman from its witness list if he refused to weaken his testimony advocating for the appointment of outside officials to review the companies’ business practices and possibly to remove senior tobacco company executives, Bazerman said last week.

The government’s six-year-old lawsuit charges the nation’s six largest tobacco companies with having conspired over the past 50 years to deceive the public about the dangers and addictiveness of smoking.

Bazerman, who is a professor at Harvard Business School, refused to change his testimony but was ultimately allowed to testify without altering it.

Bazerman said that a trial attorney told him shortly before his appearance in front of the court that two major Justice Department officials wanted him to alter his testimony.

According to Bazerman, the attorney said in their conversation, which took place less than a week before Bazerman was set to take the stand on May 4, that the demand had come from Justice Department attorney Frank Marine and Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr.

Bazerman, who would not discuss the identity of the attorney who had passed on that information, said that McCallum had threatened to remove him from the witness list if he did not water down his recommendations.

Specifically, Bazerman said he was asked to amend his testimony to note that some of his recommendations might be “legally inappropriate” under certain circumstances.

Bazerman said he is still unsure why the Justice Department officials apparently backed off.

Bazerman also noted that he does not know for certain why he was asked to moderate his testimony in the first place.

“The only explanation that I can come up with…would be political interference,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s the reason, but I can’t come up with another logical explanation.”

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller told The Washington Post last week that Bazerman’s evaluation of the government’s motives was inaccurate.

“The issues discussed with Dr. Bazerman regarding his testimony were focused on ensuring that the department’s proposals in this case complied with the long-standing department policies that apply to all racketeering cases the government brings, policies that substantially predate this administration,” Miller told the Post.

He would not comment further when contacted by The Crimson this week.

On June 20, Reps. Martin T. Meehan, D-MA, and Henry A. Waxman, D-CA, sent a letter asking the Office of Professional Responsibility, a branch of the Justice Department, to investigate Bazerman’s claims.

“The attempt to undermine this critical part of the Department’s case cannot possibly be justified,” they wrote. “But it did directly benefit senior tobacco executives—many of whom are major donors to the Republican Party—whose jobs could have been threatened by the remedies proposed by Professor Bazerman.”