Preet Bharara said Tuesday he once thought about secretly recording President Trump around the time he was fired as a U.S. attorney.
During an interview on MSNBC, host Ari Melber pressed Bharara on calls he received from the president roughly two years ago.
“In that moment we actually considered — and it sounds not as crazy as it did back then because we know about Michael Cohen recording the president and Omarosa [Manigault Newman] recording the president. We considered it,” Bharara said.
After confirming he meant he considered “taping the president in that phone call,” Bharara added, “I wanted to make sure because I had a certain amount of mistrust — it was an odd phone call to be making. It would be my word against his, if he decided to say something inappropriate. Which I didn’t necessarily know was going to happen.”
NEW: Former U.S. Attorney @PreetBharara tells @AriMelber he believes Deputy AG Rosenstein “was not joking” when he reportedly spoke about taping Trump because he himself “considered… taping the President” pic.twitter.com/REIIL77zbz
— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) March 19, 2019
For this reason, Bharara said he doesn’t think Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was joking when he reportedly brought up the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office after James Comey was fired as FBI director in May 2017. The Justice Department says Rosenstein “never authorized” any such recording.
Bharara, an ally of Comey’s who has a new book out Tuesday, Doing Justice, was fired by Trump in March 2017 as the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York.
Although Bharara met with Trump at Trump Tower before the inauguration and had told reporters Trump asked him to stay on, he was later asked to tender his resignation as part of a demand from the Justice Department for 46 U.S. attorneys to resign. Bharara, who was appointed under the Obama administration in 2009, later tweeted he was fired.
In an interview with ABC News in June 2017, Bharara described three separate phone calls he had with Trump while he was president-elect and president. All were initiated by Trump. Bharara, who noted former President Barack Obama had never called him before, said Trump’s phone calls made him feel “a bit uncomfortable.”
“It appeared he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship,” Bharara said at the time, adding he was fired by Trump 22 hours after he refused to return a phone call from the president — the third and last time the president had tried to call him.
