Preet: WH calls rattled me, too

Saying he got a sense of “déjà vu” when former FBI Director James Comey described his discomfort over private talks with the president, Preet Bharara said Sunday he, too, had some “very unusual” phone calls with Donald Trump before the president fired him as Manhattan US attorney.

Bharara said he first met with Trump at Trump Tower in November, during the transition, when the then-president-elect asked him to stay on in his administration.

Trump followed that up with three phone calls over the next four months, Bharara said on ABC’s “This Week.” Bharara related how Trump called him in December “ostensibly to shoot the breeze” making him a “little bit uncomfortable.” Trump phoned “to check in” two days before the inauguration and again in March, he said.

“He called a third time af- ter he became president, and I refused to take the call,” Bharara said. Trump fired him the next day.

“It appeared to be that he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship,” Bharara said, adding that former President Barack Obama never phoned him even once.

He compared the Trump calls to the controversial June 2016 meeting at a Phoenix airport between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who was investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server.

“For the same reasons that Donald Trump emphasized how it looked when there was that tarmac incident and you had a private conversation between someone who had an interest in an investigation and the person who was responsible for advancing or ending that investigation — it’s a very weird and peculiar thing,” Bharara said.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Trump’s private lawyers, said US attorneys work at the president’s pleasure and there would be nothing “abnormal with the executive speaking directly with his employees.”

Referring to Comey’s testimony last week that the president cleared the Oval Office so he could talk to Comey, one-on-one, and suggest he drop the probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Bharara said that’s enough to launch an obstructionof-justice case.

But several Republicans disagreed. GOP National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel called on Congress to end all probes into Russian collusion. “This is a fishing expedition,” McDaniel told “Fox News Sunday.”

McDaniel urged special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to end “quickly.” But former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich urged it to stop.

“I think this is going to be a witch hunt,” Gingrich told “Fox News Sunday.”