Washington: Preet Bharara, the former US attorney in Manhattan, said on Sunday that President Donald Trump tried to cultivate a relationship with him in the months before he was abruptly fired in March.
Bharara said the contacts with Trump made him increasingly uncomfortable because they broke with long-standing Justice Department rules on communicating with the White House. Bharara, who first publicly disclosed the contacts and his concerns about them after he was fired, said Trump’s communications were strikingly similar to those between the president and those described by the former FBI director, James B. Comey, who was fired last month.
“When I’ve been reading the stories of how the president has been contacting Jim Comey over time, felt a little bit like déjà vu,” Bharara said Sunday on This Week on ABC.
In his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, Comey said he became uneasy with the president’s repeated conversations with him, including a private White House dinner in February. Comey said he believed that Trump, who requested his loyalty during the meal, was trying to “create some sort of patronage relationship.”
Bharara said he had a similar feeling about his conversations with Trump. “I was in discussions with my own folks, and in reporting the phone call to the chief of staff to the attorney general, I said it appeared to be that he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship,” he told ABC News, calling the exchanges “a very weird and peculiar thing.”
The first contact between Trump and Bharara took place on November 30, on the 26th floor of Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump, then the president-elect, praised his work and asked for him to stay on, Bharara said.
About two weeks later, Bharara said he missed a call from Trump, leading him to consult with his senior aides about whether it was appropriate to return the call. Because Trump was not yet president, Bharara said he believed it was fine to call him.
“He called me in December — ostensibly just to shoot the breeze — and asked me how I was doing and wanted to make sure I was OK,” Bharara said on Sunday. “It was a little bit uncomfortable, but he was not the president, he was only the president-elect.”
Trump called a second time two days before his January 20 inauguration, in which the president-elect just wanted to “check in and shoot the breeze,” Bharara said. The final contact occurred March 9, a day before Bharara was among 46 US attorneys asked to resign.
Trump was then president, so Bharara said he declined to return the call and reported it to the chief of staff of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Bharara refused to resign and was fired on March 11.
“To this day I have no idea why I was fired,” he said. “You know, it doesn’t bother me. I’m living a great good life, and very happily.”
