Trump to Preet Bharara: You are fired!

New York: The call to Preet Bharara’s office from President Donald Trump’s assistant came Thursday. Would Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan, please call back? He did not.

The following day, Bharara was one of 46 US attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama asked to resign — and to immediately clean out their offices. The request took many in his office by surprise, because in a meeting in November, Bharara was asked by the then-president-elect to stay on.

Bharara refused to resign. On Saturday, he announced on Twitter that he had been fired.

It was unclear whether the president’s call on Thursday was an effort to explain his change of heart about keeping Bharara or to discuss another matter. The White House would not comment on Saturday.

However, there are protocols governing a president’s direct contact with federal prosecutors. According to two people with knowledge of the events who were not authorised to discuss sensitive conversations publicly, Bharara notified an adviser to the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, that the president had tried to contact him and that he would not respond because of those protocols. Bharara then called Trump’s assistant back to say he could not speak with the president, citing the protocols.

Bharara was a highly public prosecutor who relished the spotlight throughout more than seven years in office. He pursued several high-profile cases involving Wall Street, and he was in the middle of investigating fund-raising by Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, and preparing to try former top aides to the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who are both Democrats. It was not immediately clear how his departure would affect those cases and others that were pending.

Bharara stayed quiet until Saturday afternoon. Then, on his personal Twitter account, which he set up eight days ago, he wrote: “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired.”

Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, declined to characterise Bharara’s departure that way, saying only, “I can confirm that Mr. Bharara is no longer the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.”

Bharara, referring to the Southern District of New York, said, “Being the US Attorney in SDNY [Southern District of New York] will forever be the greatest honour of my professional life.”

All presidents choose their own appointees for US attorney positions and almost always ask those from their predecessors to leave. But the process under Trump was unusually abrupt, and it was yet another rocky encounter between the Trump administration and the nation’s law enforcement apparatus.

Bharara’s job had appeared to be secure. In November, he met at Trump Tower with the president-elect and several of his advisers, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to two people briefed on that discussion who requested anonymity.

At the meeting, according to those briefed, Trump asked Bharara to remain in the job, which Bharara relayed to reporters and television cameras in the Trump Tower lobby.

Then came the order to resign Friday, creating what was described as a feeling of whiplash in the prosecutor’s Manhattan office. One person familiar with the views of current prosecutors described an oddly subdued reaction mixed with anxiety as the events unfolded. “You have a sense of how it’s going to end, and it’s not going to end well,” the person said.

But Bharara, unlike his fellow US attorneys, publicly refused to leave. He gave no statement citing a policy or legal issue affecting his decision to refuse the resignation order.

It was unclear how many of the 46 holdovers had submitted resignations. Bharara’s colleague Robert L. Capers, the US attorney in Brooklyn, announced his resignation on Friday afternoon.

Two White House officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid offending the president, said the promise to keep Bharara on was a product of a chaotic transition process and Trump’s desire at the time to try to work with Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrat New York, with whom Bharara is close. The relationship between Trump and Schumer, the Senate minority leader, has since soured.

It was Dana Boente, the acting deputy attorney general, who called Bharara on Saturday. According to a Justice Department official, Boente told Bharara that he was one of the 46 US attorneys being told to resign.

Bharara, the official said, replied that that was in conflict with Trump’s asking him to stay on. Boente reiterated that Bharara was being asked to resign, and Bharara said that he was interpreting that as being fired. Boente then said again that the department was asking him to step down, according to the official.

Bharara’s office is overseeing the case against the former aides to Cuomo and the inquiry into fund-raising by de Blasio, who has been a target of Trump’s ire as he has positioned himself as a vocal opponent of the president’s on the left.

His office is also overseeing an investigation into whether Fox News, which is owned by media magnate Rupert Murdoch, failed to properly alert shareholders of settlements with female employees who had accused the channel’s former chief, Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment.

White House officials have said little about the timing of the mass push for resignations, other than insisting it had not been a response to a call for a purge on Fox News, where one host, Sean Hannity, urged the president to clean house at the Justice Department.