Donald Trump’s behavior “paints a picture of potential obstruction,” Preet Bharara, the former attorney for the Southern District of New York, who was fired by the president in March, said. Bharara, who was appointed by Barack Obama, added that Trump would have asked him to do something inappropriate if he had stayed on the job.
The Indian-origin attorney opened up about his life after his termination from the key post in a recent interview to CNN, which signed him up as a senior legal analyst last week.
“I’m not a different guy. I had a different job,” Bharara said.” There’s a difference in how you’re supposed to input yourself when you’re acting on behalf of the United States government, as opposed to being a private citizen. (That’s) something that the president doesn’t seem to feel.”
Bharara’s Criticism of Trump
Bharara, who was sacked by Trump after originally being promised that he would stay on, said that the reigning special counsel Robert Mueller will aggressively pursue all potential crimes, which include the obstruction of justice by the president.
“I think everything you see from our armchair seats suggests that Robert Mueller is going to chase down everything that might suggest a crime has been committed by an associate, colleague, a relative of the president, and also the president himself,” he said.
“That does not mean that there will be a referral to the House of Representatives for impeachment. That does not mean there’s going to be a charge against anyone. But I think based on my knowledge of him, he’s going to look at everything.”
When specifically asked about obstruction, Bharara replied in the affirmative.
“One of the things Mueller going to be looking at is obstruction. All of that together paints a picture of potential obstruction, and Bob Mueller is a thorough and serious person and fearless, and I think he’s gotta go there,” Bharara said of Mueller who is now heading the Russian probe into allegations that the country interfered during the U.S. presidential election.
Bharara also revealed that the president called him on phone a number of times during the days before his firing, which was “unprecedented”.
“The number of times Barack Obama called me in seven and a half years was zero,” he said. “To have a chit-chat conversation, I’m not saying it’s a certainty, but I’m saying based on what I know and based on the oddity of being called on a repeated basis and based on what happened with Jim Comey and Jeff Sessions, that at some point I believe he would have asked me to do something inappropriate.”
Preet Bharara: A High-Profile Name in U.S.
Born in 1968 in Punjab to a Sikh father and a Hindu mother, Bharara migrated with his parents to the United States when he was two years old. The Harvard and Columbia Law school alumnus was hailed as an aggressive and outspoken prosecutor of public corruption and Wall Street crime. During his tenure as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, more than 100 Wall Street executives were prosecuted on charges of insider trading and other grave offenses.