Cock-Blocked: Comey Was Not the Only Law Enforcement Official Trump Was Trying to Dominate

Preet Bharara

As U.S. attorney for New York’s Southern District -- which just incidentally includes Trump Tower in Manhattan -- Preet Bharara had a reputation as a "tenacious and bipartisan prosecutor." He indicted 17 prominent New York politicians for malfeasance, including 10 Democrats. He prosecuted insider trading cases, including one against disgraced financier Bernie Madoff.

Preet Bharara was fired from his US attorney's post by Trump very shortly after Trump had promised he would keep him on and also very shortly after Bharara stopped accepting phone calls from Trump, because he deemed those calls "inappropriate." Some things Trump said or implied made Bharara "uneasy."

Bharara says that never during the seven-plus years he served as US attorney under Barack Obama did the president ever call him on the phone to talk about a case. Shortly after his firing, it came out that Bharara was overseeing an investigation into questionable stock trades by Trump's new secretary of health and human services Tom Price. Bharara will not say if those calls from Trump were about Price or about something else that Bharara was poking into that Trump didn't want him to poke into.

After James Comey testified in Congress about Trump's trying to influence his investigation into Michael Flynn's ties to Russian intelligence, Preet Bharara told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” that Comey’s account “felt a little bit like deja vu. And I’m not the FBI director,” he said, “but I was the chief federal law enforcement officer in Manhattan with jurisdiction over a lot of things including, you know, business interests and other things in New York.”

Trump called Bharara several times, trying to “cultivate some kind of relationship” with him, according to Bharara, making Bharara uneasy enough to report the calls to the chief of staff for Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who did precisely nothing about it, obviously). Bharara says he was dismissed from the prosecutor’s job 22 hours after he finally refused to take a call from the president.