Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney whom President Donald Trump fired in March, said he had a "strong belief" that if Bharara had remained in the job, Trump would have asked him "to do something inappropriate."
"Had I not been fired, and had Donald Trump continued to cultivate a direct personal relationship with me, it's my strong belief that, at some point, given the history, the president of the United States would have asked me to do something inappropriate," Bharara said in an episode of his podcast, "Stay Tuned With Preet."
Trump had asked FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump also asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions about dropping a criminal case against ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bharara noted on the podcast.
Trump called Bharara a number of times during the presidential transition that Trump made a number of phone calls to Bharara, and was convinced that the president was attempting to "cultivate a relationship" with Bharara, who at the time was U.S. attorney for New York, over the region that contains Trump's real estate company, Bharara said.
"To my knowledge, Donald Trump did not reach out to any other U.S. attorney, and none has come forward to say they got a phone call — it seemed like it was just me," Bharara said on his podcast.
After Trump called Bharara a third time, Bharara decided to refuse to take the call. "I have reason to believe later that nobody knew that Donald Trump was calling me from the Oval Office. I'm not saying he was going to tell me to do something I shouldn't do, but I thought even the phone call was a problem," Bharara said.
The then-U.S. attorney told the White House he was not interested in speaking with the president one on one. He was fired the next day, Bharara said on the podcast.
Bharara said he does not know why he was fired, but he says there are multiple possibilities. "I'm prepared to believe lots of things are possible. It could be because someone got angry that I didn't return the phone call. It could be that person thought that all of these U.S. attorneys were part of this nonsensical notion of the deep state. It could be a combination of reasons. It could have been an accident and they decided to stick with it. It could be that they didn't want independent people around," Bharara said during his podcast.
The podcaster will be joining CNN as a legal analyst, a network spokesman announced Thursday.
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