Bharara felt ‘deja vu’ after hearing Comey’s testimony
WASHINGTON As Donald Trump continued to attack sacked FBI director James Comey on Sunday, former US attorney Preet Bharara came to the defence of his friend, saying he had himself felt a sense of “deja vu” listening to latter’s testimony at a Senate hearing on Thursday.
In a tweet, Trump called Comey “cowardly” for releasing notes of their conversations, which the president and his legal team have described as leaks which they intend to challenge legally. Others have disputed that characterisation, arguing they were not classified documents.
Though Bharara conceded Comey might have not have chosen the best way to release his notes, he had “felt a little bit like deja vu” about Comey’s interactions with Trump and how his firing played out, tracking closely with his own just a few weeks before.
Bharara was asked by the Trump administration to put in his papers along with 45 other US attorneys on March 10. He refused and was fired the next day, which he had himself announced on Twitter.
In his first interview since then, the high-profile IndianAmerican told ABC there had been a series of “unusual phone calls” to him from Trump — two of them from him as presidentelect and the third as president — in which “it appeared to be that he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship”.
The calls were, as Bharara described them, to “shoot the breeze” and “check in”. He went on to say they seemed similar to a call Comey has said he got from the president once when he was about to board a helicopter — to “check in” with him.
The third and the most consequential of them was on March 9. “The call came in. I got a message. We deliberated over it, thought it was inappropriate to return the call. And 22 hours later I was asked to resign along with 45 other people,” Bharara said, who had looped in the office of the attorney general.
Comey has said Trump had asked him to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn’s Russia links in a similar one-on-one conversation after the attorney general, the chief of staff and the vicepresident had left the Oval Office.
Attorney general Jeff Sessions is likely to be asked about it when he testifies this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting one of the multiple investigations currently on in Russian meddling in US elections in 2016 and alleged collusion by Trump campaign aides.