After Preet Bharara was forced out as U.S. Attorney for New York’s Southern District in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, he turned his legal expertise to gigs as a podcaster, CNN analyst and law professor. While those may seem like steps down for a star prosecutor, the intervening years have given Bharara plenty to talk about.
Bharara’s tenure at the Southern District was marked by a series of high-profile government corruption and white-collar crime cases. His predecessors there include both Rudy Giuliani and James Comey. His firing in March 2017 followed a confusing about-face by the president, who had initially told Bharara he’d keep his job. All of which is to say, Bharara has opinions about how the Trump administration’s behavior is being checked by the justice system and the public.
He’s carefully tracked the Mueller investigation, discussed the cases against Michael Cohen and associates of Rudy Giuliani, and more recently analyzed the impeachment developments in the U.S. House. Along the way, he’s amassed more than 1 million followers on Twitter, and his podcast Stay Tuned has at times been the most popular in New York state. Earlier this year, he published his first book, Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law.
Bharara will deliver the University of Vermont’s annual George D. Aiken Lecture on Thursday, November 14. Ahead of his appearance in Burlington, he spoke to VTDigger about why investigators so far have struggled to incriminate the president — and how the current impeachment inquiry is different. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDIGGER: I’m curious about the role of your old office in the case against the president. You were let go presumably so that Trump could appoint someone who might be less aggressive in investigating him. But the Southern District of New York has gone after his lawyer Rudy Giuliani; it’s been fighting to get the president’s tax returns. Wasn’t this what the president was trying to avoid by firing you?
Preet Bharara: You’ll have to ask the president if he didn’t get what he bargained for. But you’ve got to remember, that place is full of professional, independent-thinking folks who do their job without fear or favor, as the oath requires.
People don’t always understand, the U.S. attorney himself or herself is not the one out knocking on doors and and serving grand jury subpoenas and doing the stakeouts. Those are career professionals who are doing that. So if, in the course of their investigations, they find evidence that somebody, even somebody close to the president like Michael Cohen, has committed crimes, they pursue it. Then at some point, it goes up the chain. And it’s a really hard thing, actually, to get away with crushing an investigation that’s done in good faith.
So it’s independent by nature, because that’s how the place operates. And that’s not necessarily affected by who’s at the top. Everything I’ve seen about [current U.S. Attorney] Geoff Berman is that on cases it’s untoward for him to be running, like Michael Cohen, he recused himself. And in other cases, you pursue what the career people recommend pursuing.
VTD: We’ve been following the impeachment inquiry more broadly, in part because Vermont’s lone congressman, Rep. Peter Welch, sits on the Intelligence Committee. I know from your podcast you’ve been watching what’s happening on Capitol Hill very closely. And so far there seem to be so many moments in this process that seem like turning points in the case against the president, but then nothing happens.
PB: Well, something’s happening now. I assume you’re speaking broadly that in two years of the Mueller investigation, it didn’t really lead to anything. Then in the space of days or weeks, it went from zero to 60 with holding the president accountable. That’s fascinating to me: that you had an entire volume two of the Mueller report that couldn’t move Nancy Pelosi off the needle, and then the Ukraine stuff, almost overnight it seems, was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
VTD: What’s surprising about that?
PB: I actually don’t think it’s surprising if you think about it. I think it may look surprising to the public eye.
I think it’s partly driven by the fact that we did have the Mueller investigation. We did have all this proof laid out of obstruction. The president seems to have gotten away with that, at least for the time being. And rather than learn a lesson from it, rather than pay attention to the loud criticism of involving a foreign power in our own elections, and happily and greedily taking advantage of favors like that, this president decided, ‘yeah, I’m just going to do it again.’
The timeline is fairly extraordinary. On July 24 of this year, Robert Mueller testifies. There’s a lot of hoopla leading up to that, you know, and the hearing wasn’t great. Talk of impeachment faded, I think, as that testimony closed on the evening of July 24. And then when does [Trump] call President Zelensky of Ukraine and put the arm on him to help investigate the Bidens? The next day.
It was something about the brazen timeline of it, I think, that caused some people to change their minds. And then you have direct evidence that the president himself was involved. You have the president himself on a phone call, not telling other people. It’s very vivid, very understandable and very translatable to the public. The bottom line is, you should not be ordering foreign leaders to investigate your rivals, and everyone gets that. It, I think, resonates in the public consciousness as something that’s an abuse of power. And that’s why I think this thing has more legs.
Then, you have a rash of revelations. The Mueller investigation was a standard operating procedure of, do everything secretly and quietly. Notwithstanding that a lot of things leaked through. But when they leak in the paper, it just does not have the same force as when it’s real, official events, right?
Now, based on what Adam Schiff and the Intelligence Committee and other committees are doing, every other day there’s an actual event. Now, we have the actual opening statement from Alexander Vindman that says how inappropriate he thought the phone call was. We have Bill Taylor’s opening statement. We have the [whistleblower] complaint. We have a transcript, a readout out of the call. And these are happening every few days. So it stays in the new cycle in a way that does that it didn’t with the Mueller investigation. It’s easier to understand.
VTD: Based on what you just ran through, I’m curious where you fall on this question of how broad or narrow the scope of the impeachment inquiry should be. Do you think this should be laser-focused on the Ukraine call, or is there a broader set of allegations that should be explored here?
PB: I have to think about that. On the one hand, you want to have a streamlined indictment. You don’t want to overdo it. You want it to be simple and understandable for the jury. But on the other hand, you don’t want to leave stuff on the cutting room floor if it’s important and you feel there’s a duty to hold people accountable for it.
I tend to think that because this is a political process, the general strategizing that real criminal prosecutors do maybe shouldn’t be the way that these politicians think about it. There’s an argument to be made, because it’s a political exercise, not to drag in the Mueller stuff. That was sort of adjudicated unfairly in the minds of a lot of people, but it’s done.
This is new. This is fresh. This is easily understandable. Why muck it up with the Mueller stuff? So I think there’s a decent argument to just proceed for now on this stuff.
VTD: You’ve been well-known for being aggressive on corrupt politicians and white-collar crime. Just recently we heard our Sen. Bernie Sanders, on the 2020 campaign trail, talking about how he wants to appoint an attorney general who would focus on white-collar crime. Why does a candidate need to point this out? Why hasn’t our justice system been focused on this in the past?
PB: Well, I don’t think anybody brought more white-collar prosecutions — whether it’s fraud, or embezzlement, or Ponzi schemes, or insider trading or accounting fraud — than my office during the Obama administration.
Some people have the view that there were more people who should have gone to prison because of the financial crisis. But lots and lots of people and lots and lots of different offices took a look. And in some cases, I think, people looked very hard. But you can’t make a case unless you have the evidence.
There was lots of bad conduct, lots of bad behavior. There’s lots of greed. There’s lots of ambition. There was lots of pulling the wool over people’s eyes with respect to representations made. But at the end of the day, I’m not aware of anyone, anywhere — career people — making the recommendation, based on the evidence they had and the laws that are in existence, that the head of a particular bank should have been hauled off in cuffs.
That’s not a satisfactory answer to a lot of people. But a lot of what happened with the financial crisis is, they had defenses. It might be irritating that they could rely on the advice of counsel or the advice of accountants or the sophistication of the parties who bought some of the junk that was being offloaded. But, yeah, it’s a point of soreness with respect to the financial crisis. I totally get that.
VTD: What can people expect from this lecture that you’re giving at UVM?
PB: That event is two weeks away, which is a lifetime in the world of law and politics. I presume we would spend some of that time talking about what is happening in that moment, how impeachment is proceeding. And I hope we’ll also talk about deeper and more evergreen issues like I talked about in my book: the nature of equal justice under law, what rule of law means, how we can have better democratic institutions, how law enforcement can remain independent. What the future will look like for criminal justice — and for justice generally — whether Trump gets reelected or not.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Q&A: Preet Bharara on the politics of impeachment.