Former Us Attorney Preet Bharara -- who had been in charge of the Southern District of New York since 2009 -- was fired by President Donald Trump back in March under controversial circumstances. In an interview today on ABC's "This Week," Bharara claimed that in the days preceding his dismissal he had grown uncomfortable with the calls that he received from the President. This new development is sure to open a new can of worms.
Calls from the President
The tough-talking Preet Bharara, who had gone after several Wall Street executives involved in insider trading and politicians across party lines during his tenure, finally opened up about his ouster in the interview.
He said that President Donald Trump called him plenty of times and usually the conversations were mundane in nature. Prior to calling his office, the President had earlier had a meeting with Bharara and at that meeting, he had been told that he would continue as the US Attorney for the Southern District.
Bharara, however, felt that the calls were inappropriate in nature since the attorney general had not been kept in the loop. He went on to say that he felt that the President had been trying to “cultivate some kind of relationship." Eventually, he decided not to answer one of Donald Trump's calls and he was fired withing the next 24 hours.
Former US Attorney @PreetBharara recounts "very unusual" calls with Trump: "There has to be some kind of arms-length relationship." pic.twitter.com/dkVrYEOMqh
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 11, 2017
The reaction was swift
The reaction from the President's camp following the interview was immediate.
One of the President's attorneys named Mark Corallo was the one to respond to Bharara's explosive claims. Corallo did not dismiss the claims but instead said that it was perfectly fine for Donald Trump to call him and if he refused to speak to the President then he deserved the sack. He made these comments through his Twitter account.
One of the tweets read, "All US Attorneys work for and at the pleasure of POTUS. There is nothing abnormal with the executive speaking directly with his employees."
However, Corallo soon made comments that indicated that he believed that Bharara had a political ax to grind and that the comments in the interview were simply a manifestation of his political ideologies.
Bharara was one of the 46 Federal Attorneys asked to resign from their post during the transition, but in an unprecedented move, he ultimately refused to hand in his resignation. Eventually he was fired and it soon snowballed into a topic of great controversy -- seemingly ongoing at that.
