Preet’s Pathetic Preening
He failed to catch de Blasio, now he’s sniping at Trump
FORMER US Attorney Preet Bharara has a new title these days — scholar in residence at NYU — which is almost as pretentious as the tweets he’s been spraying around the Internet.
Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio, once upon a time in Bharara’s gunsights, calmly counts his rapidly accumulating campaign cash — almost $700,000 dropped into the pot over the past two months alone. He’s secure in the knowledge that whatever danger he might once have faced passed in March — when lengthy investigations of City Hall by Preet and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance were terminated.
Happy days are here again for the sitting-pretty mayor — and they’re just the way they’ve always been: seedy but survivable.
For example, The Post’s Rich Calder reported Monday that fully 65 percent of the so-called campaign-cash bundlers who helped de Blasio’s first campaign went on to win special favors from the new administration — including “23 big-bucks donors who got appointed to municipal boards and committees, eight developers who benefited from government actions or policy changes, six political allies put on the city payroll and five business owners who scored lucrative contracts.”
All in all, reported Calder, “67 of de Blasio’s 102 bundlers reaped rewards after pouring cash into his political war chest or raising money for his transition effort and inauguration ceremonies, records show.”
Meanwhile, in March, Bharara’s acting successor as US attorney, Joon Kim, reported that prosecutors had found “several circumstances in which Mayor de Blasio and others acting on his behalf solicited donations from individuals who sought official favors from the city, after which the mayor made or directed inquiries to relevant city agencies on behalf of those donors.”
So where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?
Well, not all egregious behavior is prosecutable, to put the most fa- vorable interpretation on it. And in the end the only person who truly knows why Bharara didn’t pull the trigger is Preet himself.
Thus did the prosecutor’s leak-riddled, often entertaining but nevertheless fruitless two-year investigation end with a big smile on de Blasio’s face.
Bharara found himself on the outs as part of a general Trump administration sweep-out of Obamaera US attorneys. And while that was neither unprecedented nor unjustified, Preet seems to have taken it personally.
Well-known for provocative tweeting, Bharara now uses the medium to chew on Donald Trump’s leg for disrespecting integrity in government, or something. Last Sunday, in The Washington Post, Preet noted what he termed a shortage of people willing to say no to the president — the implication being that he himself was fired because he did just that. Think Preet Bharara, profile in courage.
But there’s precious little on the record to suggest that was the case, to be perfectly blunt. Bharara was on track to become a great prosecuting attorney in the New York tradition — Tom Dewey comes to mind — but in the end he either failed or flinched. To be sure, he convicted the supremely corrupt Sheldon Silver, former speaker of the New York Assembly. And the Cuomo administration is unlikely to weather with credibility the upcoming corruption trials of key gubernatorial aides.
But he fell flat on his face in New York City; there’s really no intellectually honest way to avoid that.
Manhattan DA Vance — who ran a parallel investigation of de Blasio fund-raising activities aimed at overturning the state Senate’s Republican majority — also failed to indict, and for the flimsiest of excuses.
Yes, the mayor’s operatives showered upstate Democrats with cash, Vance conceded. And, yes, this took place “contrary to the intent and spirit of the laws that impose candidate contribution limits.”
But here’s the rationalization: The mayor’s lawyers had said it was all OK before the fact — so what’s a prosecutor to do? Nothing, as it turned out.
But, said Vance: “This conclusion is not an endorsement of the conduct at issue” — a masterpiece of artful understatement for someone not known for a sense of humor.
On the other hand, when the fellow at center stage blinks, what’s a bit player to do? At least Vance hasn’t gone all sanctimonious about it.
Bharara, as noted, landed on his feet: He’s scholar in residence at the NYU School of Law — a respectable perch from which @PreetBharara can tweet along with all the other anti-Trump birdies.
This is not to say the president doesn’t deserve the grief. He mostly does. But really, Preet Bharara looks a little silly playing scold, given the circumstances.