Fired U.S. prosecutor: Agreed last fall to stay
Now given walking papers, he says
NEW YORK — Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who was asked by President Donald Trump to remain in his post shortly after the election, was fired Saturday after he questioned an order to submit his resignation.
Bharara, appointed in 2009 by Trump’s predecessor, former President Barack Obama, met with Trump on Nov. 30, saying afterward that he’d been asked to remain in the job.
On Saturday, he took to Twitter, telling the world about his dismissal — hours before the Justice Department confirmed late Saturday that Bharara was no longer a U.S. attorney.
“I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired,” Bharara wrote on his personal feed, which he set up in the past two weeks.
In a statement later, he said, “Serving my country as U.S. Attorney here for the past seven years will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life, no matter what else I do or how long I live. One hallmark of justice is absolute independence, and that was my touchstone every day that I served.”
Bharara was among 46 holdover Obama appointees who were called by the acting deputy attorney general Friday and told to immediately submit their resignations and plan to clear out of their offices. About half of the 93 Obama-era U.S. attorneys had already left their jobs.
During Friday’s call, Bharara asked for clarity about whether the requests for resignations applied to him, given his previous conversation with Trump, and did not immediately get a definitive answer, according to a person familiar with the exchange. Justice officials were not able to clear up the confusion.
The announcement that Bharara had been told to resign created feelings of whiplash inside his office, according to two people familiar with the views of current prosecutors. One of the people described an oddly subdued reaction mixed with anxiety as the events unfolded.
“You have a sense of how it’s going to end, and it’s not going to end well,” the person said.
Meanwhile, Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, requested Saturday that the committee receive a summary of investigations linked to Trump, whether they touch on his administration, transition, campaign and organization, “so that we can understand the full implications of this weekend’s firings.”
He said he suspected Bharara “could be reviewing a range of potential improper activity emanating from Trump Tower and the Trump campaign, as well as entities with financial ties to the president or the Trump organization.”
The order to resign came as Bharara’s office is prosecuting former associates of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a bribery case. Also, prosecutors recently interviewed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as part of a probe into his fundraising. The mayor’s spokesman has said the mayor is cooperating
and that he and his staff had acted appropriately.
Bharara, once lauded on the cover of Time magazine as the man who is “busting Wall Street” after successfully prosecuting dozens of insider traders, was also investigating the financial terms of settlements of sexual-harassment claims against Fox News by its employees.
Bharara said current Deputy U.S. Attorney Joon Kim will serve as acting U.S. attorney.
In the Trump meeting, held at Trump Tower, Bharara met with the president-elect and several of his advisers, including Trump’s son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, and his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, according to two people briefed on that discussion who requested anonymity to
describe a private meeting with Trump.
At the meeting, according to those briefed, Trump urged Bharara to remain in the job. Bharara said after the meeting, “I agreed to stay on.”
It was unclear how many of the 46 holdovers had submitted resignations. By way of contrast, Bharara’s colleague Robert Capers, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, announced his resignation Friday afternoon.
Chris Thyer, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, who was appointed by Obama in 2009, did not return a phone message Friday night seeking comment. Thyer’s spokesman, Chris Givens, also did not respond to a phone message Friday evening or an email Saturday afternoon seeking confirmation
of whether Thyer had been asked to submit his resignation.
While it is customary for a new president to replace virtually all of the 93 U.S. attorneys, it often occurs at a slower pace. But there is little precedent for Bharara’s refusal to resign.
Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general, lost his position as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama in a similar sweep by then-Attorney General Janet Reno, under President Bill Clinton, in 1993. George W. Bush also dismissed holdover political appointees in the Justice Department.
Robert Morgenthau, a Democratic U.S. attorney in Manhattan, held out for nearly a year after Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 inauguration, saying he
needed to see some important cases through. He ultimately left in January 1970, after the White House declared that he was being replaced and announced a nominee.
The White House has said little about the timing of the push for resignations, other than insisting that it was not a response to a call for a purge that Trump saw on Fox News, where host Sean Hannity urged the president to clean house at the Justice Department.
Two White House officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the promise to keep Bharara on was a product of a chaotic transition process and Trump’s desire at the time to try to work with Sen. Charles Schumer, with whom Bharara is close. The relationship between Trump and Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has since soured.
Schumer, a Democrat, said in a statement Friday that he was “troubled to learn” of the resignation demands, particularly of Bharara, since Trump called him in November and assured him that he wanted Bharara to remain in place.
Phil Singer, a former aide to Schumer and a Democratic strategist, called it “absurd” to suggest that Bharara’s firing was meant to punish Schumer.
Annemarie McAvoy, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor, said it was not surprising that Trump might want Bharara gone since there’s a good chance any subpoena seeking information about Trump campaign links to Russians would go through his office. She said it was also possible that Trump wanted “to take out as many people as they can in the prior administration given the leaks and problems that they’re having.”
Before Bharara was fired Saturday, one of New York’s top elected Republicans expressed support for him.
“Good for Preet, he is doing the job he was appointed to do!” Assemblyman Brian Kolb, the state Assembly minority leader, wrote on Twitter.
Assemblyman Steven McLaughlin, a Republican who was fond of calling for “draining the swamp” in Albany, N.Y., long before Trump embraced the expression, had urged Trump and Sessions to reconsider Friday.
“Big mistake,” he wrote on Twitter.
The Southern District of New York, which Bharara has overseen since 2009, encompasses Manhattan, Trump’s home before he was elected president, as well as the Bronx, Westchester, and other counties north of New York City.