Preet Bharara - Doing Justice As The Sheriff of Wall Street

Full transcript: Preet Bharara on London Real

3:33 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Preet Bharara, the American lawyer, author and broadcaster who was famously fired by President Trump and banned by President Putin during your eight-year tenure as the United States Attorney for New York. You earned the title Sheriff of Wall Street for high-level prosecutions of hedge funds as well as mafia bosses and terrorists. Your career inspired the hit TV show Billions, and Time magazine recognized you as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

3:59 Your new book, Doing Justice, reflects on your time in office. Preet, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having me. Great to have you here. I want to talk about so much.

4:08 Okay, and you know, as going through a lot of the work that you did on Wall Street, I was kind of reflecting back to my time on Wall Street, and I wonder if I can tell you a little bit of… Please, I would like to hear. Okay, so unload. I was getting my engineering degree at MIT and I was set to graduate in ’93, and I was getting jobs at like Ford Motor Company and the Aerospace Corporation, and then I saw the movie Wall Street and I kind of got obsessed with this whole thing.

4:34 Greed is good. Greed is good, right? And I know you like some of these movies and mob movies to talk about that. I quoted from that movie at my big press conference. You did?

4:42 There’s… we could talk about… Okay, yeah, I went right with you. Sorry. So I got really fascinated with this. The MIT Sloan School of Management let undergrads take classes at the b-school, so I took options and futures courses, and I ended up going, and in ’93 I started for Bankers Trust at One Liberty Plaza, and I was 22 years old and moved to Manhattan, and I walked in, and probably the fourth day on the trading floor they gave me a phone and they said, this one, this line goes to the Chicago Board of Trade, this one goes to Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

5:11 And I ended up trading derivatives for Bankers Trust and I had this whole experience of being this Wall Street trader. Now about a year later Bankers Trust was prosecuted and then they threw the RICO Act at them, right, and they ended up settling, but it was like Procter and Gamble and a bunch of other companies. So I’ve kind of seen it all, that whole thing happened, and I’ve also had a bunch of buddies that went on to investment banking and hedge funds and that kind of thing.

5:36 I then moved to London and did credit derivatives, but I had a whole experience there and I always reflect back on it. It’s just this kind of crazy time where I couldn’t really believe what was happening and just the… Did you like it? I really did like it, but obviously not enough to stay in the business because I started doing this. Well, there was that crime thing.

5:57 Well, you know, you know, it was like, oh, I think you left because… Well, then I didn’t do the crime. Well, but I hope not. You know, I saw, I saw, I mean, I saw it. He played quickly the name game for a second.

6:09 Yeah, which is odd because cameras are rolling. Yeah, maybe this will be awkward. But not so good, you know. Mark Lowry? No, he would have been at Bankers Trust same years.

6:18 You what, he’d been a salesman out of Bucknell. Okay, would he been a salesperson, undulator, I think a traitor. Anyway, okay, what, he’d been wrapped up in that investigation? No, no, we just, he’s a fellow, friend here, my brother’s best friend with him, he started a business. But okay, just, you know, I don’t hear Bankers Trust that much these days.

6:33 Yeah, well, God, Popeye, Deutsche Bank and all that stuff later. And so I remember doing that. I also remember reading the book Den of Thieves, which was this whole prosecution of Michael Milken by Giuliani, who later became mayor, and I just got to see these two sides of the coin, and then lately of course I’ve been watching Billions by chance, and I see these kind of two sides of the coin. But what do you think of me telling you all that? I was very interesting, I’m enjoying it immensely.

6:59 I feel like interviewing you now. Why did you end up leaving finance? You know, I actually went from Bankers Trust to First National Bank of Chicago and then I ended up going to London and moving kind of into the credit derivatives brokerage business. I wasn’t at the banks anymore, um, and then eight years ago I left because I just felt, I felt soulless. I was making money.

7:18 Why, why are you still so… Did you think just because of what you were doing, or because the institutions had a culture that lacks soul? Good question. Really good question. I mean, I’m surrounded by people that had one goal, which was just to make money, and I just felt like something was missing, and I didn’t feel like the culture ever taught me anything different.

7:38 And I’d say this, didn’t make anything… would you have been happier working tomorrow come here? Mmm, I don’t know. It’s a good question. I don’t know. No other words, I ask is…

7:46 Yeah, I talked about this in the book a little bit. There’s a whole chapter called “Culture” in the book, which seems odd to have in the book about stories of prosecution and punishment and crime, but you know, I often get the question, how come some places have a lot of people get arrested or have enforcement issues and some other places don’t? I think the difference is culture. You know, in some places there is a culture of, you know, integrity, and people do the right thing the right way, and some place is not.

8:13 And one of the things I used to do when I was U.S. attorney and have done it since is go talk to not lawyers and aspiring lawyers, would have talked to business students. I’ve been to Sloan, but more frequently I’ve been to Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School, some other places, and I remember there was one occasion where I went to Harvard Business School and I’m talking to the students, they have an ethics program that they run in the middle of the year, and I would, I’ve done it every year, I think seven out of eight years, and someone raised their hand and they said this young male student said, last summer I interviewed at ten Wall Street firms, and of those ten only one asked me any question that indicated they cared about my integrity or that indicated they cared that I knew that they had integrity and cared about it.

8:59 Otherwise it was all, you know, questions about his resume or about quantitative skills and all sorts of other things which are important, you need to, you know, screen for those things, but I thought that was interesting. Is that was that your experience? I mean, literally I got on that floor, I’m 22 years old, so I don’t know the practical sides of trading and literal… When you interviewed, did they say, drop it? No.

9:19 And he pushed up – not at all. No, I mean, no, it was all about my quantitative skills, how many gas stations are there in America, how can you figure that out, all that stuff. But my point was is that I honestly even made the analogy at the time of watching my father of not that this happened, but if you watch your father abuse your mother, you probably grow up and abuse your wife. And when I got to Bankers Trust the culture was rip as much money out of every single trade as possible.

9:40 Like that was the ethics or the culture, right? And I was an incentive, and so that’s the incentive that gets rewarded and that’s what you do. Yeah, and that, and that’s, I’m sure, was the culture, and maybe it still is, maybe it’s changing, I don’t know. Look at Silicon, sir, a lot of places. I mentioned Wells Fargo, even though we didn’t have the particular case that got a lot of notoriety in the last year.

9:59 You know, Wells Fargo, you had a division where the incentive was, gotta open up the cows and you get rewarded by how many accounts you open up. When you create that incentive and you also create the ability for people to set up fake accounts, well, now they’ve mastered the trick, and so thousands and thousands, I thought maybe hundreds of thousands, of fake accounts were set up because of the incentive structure, right? And that’s a problem, right? So you go and have these ethics discussions with these students that are gonna go into the business.

10:25 Yeah, I mean, not all of them, but many of them. Yeah, and are they willing to engage more now than, say, they were 10 or 15 years ago? So my experience goes back, you know, about eight, eight years. No, I look, the reason I think it’s important to engage with them in business school is I think a lot of them still have, I still have idealism and still wanna do things the right way, and you know, a younger version of yourself would say, you know, I like finance and I’m interested in it and making money is good and I want to be well-off, all of which are fine and can be patriotic qualities, but I want something more, and maybe one of the reasons to make a lot of money is I can do some good with it when I’ve made enough, which can also be fine.

11:04 Is that a good justification? No, not necessarily, but look, I don’t begrudge people. I think the problem with anybody doing anything for money is that, and maybe I’m wrong about this, you can correct me, the most happy, successful people who have a ton of money, in my experience, I know a number of them, including my brother and Mark who I mentioned earlier, they didn’t do it for the money. I mean, that’s a consequence of what they did. They did it because they were driven to do something.

11:30 I think, you know, the lawyers who were, you know, fabulously rich, the the authors who are, you know, J.K. Rowling, I don’t think set out to become, you know, the only billionaire authors on earth. Oprah Winfrey is one of the richest people on earth. They did it because they loved it, and a side consequence is making money, then that’s fine. But if your only goal is making money, I think, hey, you’re not happy ultimately, like you say, and you probably are not as good at it as you could have been if you did something else.

11:59 Hmm, what if you just want to be the best, cuz it can kind of, and yet money is the sign of that, then it gets kind of gray. Well, look at the flip side of the coin. I will tell you from experience is you have people who had a lot of money, you know, people who traded, some of them we prosecuted, and you would think, well, why would you, if you had a billion dollars, why would you cheat, why would you engage in insider trading to get more money? That became sometimes the sort of common sense defense of the lawyers who say, what, Raj Rajaratnam, he’s got a billion dollars, why does he have to do this and be stupid?

12:31 Why would he do it? Well, he did, and people do, and maybe it’s just, it’s, you know, related to what you said, you want to be the best. You just can’t abide that someone else had a greater return than your hedge fund, even though you have your billion, and the other, maybe even the other hedge fund, you know, that the head doesn’t have a billion and they have fewer assets under management, but you know what, you just can’t bear that they did a little bit better than you, because that’s how you, if you measure yourself in a particular way, it is gonna cause you to act a particular way.

13:01 Do you end up having sympathy for some of these people that you end up prosecuting? Oh sure, yeah, you can. Absolutely. Some people have no sympathy for at all. There was an article about, you know, a fairly young defendant who we prosecuted, man that we prosecuted, who was at a hedge fund fee at which, and yeah, I made a big mistake.

13:21 I don’t think he was an evil person, but he broke the law and he was caught up in it because lots of people were getting caught up in it at the time, and there was a New York Times article about his case and about the sentencing, and it was, you know, pretty emotional sentencing, and his family was there, and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, did you read that article? And it was at some event, and I think they thought it was a gotcha moment for me. Does that make you, how does it make you feel, that article?

13:44 I said, made me feel terrible, made me feel terrible that that man made those mistakes, caused himself to be separated from his freedom, caused his family to have to suffer, I caused humiliation to everyone. Nothing good comes with that. I don’t celebrate it, I’m not happy about it, but one thing I do think is good about that article, because it was so well written, was so persuasive, and it was so sad, that maybe other people will read it who are in a position to break the law like this person was, and maybe they won’t, maybe they won’t do it, maybe they’ll think twice.

14:13 So, you know, you take no joy, if you, any prosecutor takes joy at the moment of conviction, I think it’s a problematic prosecutor, shouldn’t be on the job, even when you take down a massive hedge fund, I guess SAC or something. Yeah, no, there’s no joy in it. Look, that, the job is to do what the right thing is to do, right, and to do justice, and sometimes a consequence of that is that, you know, a business may fold and a person may lose their liberties for some period of time, and that can be gratifying, and sometimes when there are victims of crimes, it can be incredibly satisfying because you’ve gotten the money back for the victims.

14:51 When we returned billions of dollars to the victims of Bernard Madoff and his massive Ponzi scheme, yeah, that’s gratifying. What I’m saying is at the moment of the individual who has been charged with a crime, who is, you know, obviously, definitionally imperfect but may have other aspects of his life or her life that are good, at that moment when they get convicted, it’s not a moment of joy, that’s all I’m saying. Yeah, you mentioned the, your speech when your first ones was the “greed is good”, can you just describe?

15:19 Yeah, so I went a little off, so this, the case I was just talking about, rod to the case against the Galleon Group, right, which was, I think, a hedge fund that had an eight billion or so under management, I could have the number wrong, and the head of the hedge fund group was Raj Rajaratnam, who we charged, I think, in November of 2009, and at the press conference announcing the charges I wanted to send a message of deterrence, and I guess I also wanted it to be a little more memorable than, you know, maybe I should have been thinking about, and at the end of my remarks announcing the case, because it had, you know, echoes of Wall Street, there hadn’t been such a, I don’t think there’d been such a large insider trading prosecution in that generation since that time, since Milken, since Milken, just 25 years, it was a long time, and I said, you know, sometimes greed is not good.

16:11 That was my homage to your favorite film. Do you have a flair for performance? To a certain extent, your own daughter said you had drama queen. Yeah, you’ll have to read the book to find out what the hell Brian’s talking about. I don’t think it’s a look, like my view is, and I got in trouble once, and I talked about it in the book, for maybe, you know, being a little, you know, too memorable, but I think if you speak, the purpose is to be heard, and there’s no point to standing up in front of a podium if you’re the Attorney General of the United States or U.S. attorney or District Attorney.

16:46 I think if you’re going to choose to speak, it should either have the function of explaining what is not otherwise understandable, although I don’t know what that really means if you’re not allowed to go outside of what’s in the indictment, the indictment speaks for itself, or you can make clear that, you know, whatever thing that you were talking about that day is important and the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth because there’s a cop on the beat. Now that sounds old-fashioned and maybe, you know, a little bit macho, I don’t mean it that way. People should know that there are others who are in the line of work to protect their money or to make sure the markets are fair or to prevent public corruption or to keep the homeland safe.

17:27 All of those things are very important, and if you can make sure that the word is amplified in an appropriate way that doesn’t jeopardize anyone’s fair trial and it causes other people to think, maybe I shouldn’t do this thing, that’s for the good. And if you’re gonna get up there and dispute platitudes and nobody cares about and people will forget and nobody will mention ever again, I’m not sure what the purposes of speaking. And it made you more effective?

17:47 I think so. It scared people. I mean, all these hedge fund managers must have looked at that and said, okay, this guy’s coming for me as opposed to the next cop on the beat who might want to go home early. Or, yeah, I don’t think, I don’t know a lot of cops on the beat who want to go home early, but the other thing I said, that announcement was, I emphasized one of the tools we used in the insider trading prosecutions up to that point. It was not something that I invented, I thought, I inherited these investigations that were already under way, so I didn’t commence the investigation of Galleon, my predecessors did, and they used a tool that had never been used before in insider trading cases as far as I know, the wiretap, and nothing wrong with that, although it was challenged in court, and those challenges were defeated.

18:28 Securities fraud is allowed to be a basis for the obtaining of a warrant of a wiretap in federal court in the United States of America. But I wanted to make another deterrent, pterence point when I announced the Galleon Group case, and that was, you know, next, I said, I forgot always exactly, I wouldn’t say it was a flare for anything, but I wanted to emphasize the point that next time you think about, you know, trading insert information, remember law enforcement may be listening, because we were in some cases, you know, when bright, smart people like you, I’m not saying you, but people who decide to go into finance who have been to schools like MIT and others, they’re smart people. I’ve always had this hope, maybe it’s wrong, but I think it’s borne out by logic, there’s some kinds of crimes that are very hard to deter.

19:10 It’s really hard to deter terrorism. That requires, you know, doing something to unravel, I guess, somebody who’s been radicalized and who was pursuing jihadist terrorism or any other kind of terrorism that’s based on ideology and hatred. It’s hard to deter them. By arresting a terrorist, you know, the next terrorist doesn’t necessarily get the message, right? That also may be true of certain kinds of gang crimes with people who have had, you know, bad circumstances in life and they maybe get led down a path of crime.

19:38 But, you know, what really privileged, smart people who went to great schools and are highly credentialed and have a lot of money to begin with and have great lives, those people you think are capable of engaging in cost-benefit analysis. If you went to the Sloan School of Management or you went to Wharton, you should understand how to assess risk, and if the prosecutor can increase your sense of risk in breaking the law and cooking the books and doing all sorts of other bad things, then that’s a good thing. So I always thought in the white collar area, you know, a prosecutor’s office, you know, along with the FBI and whatever other law enforcement agency was working with you, could actually have a deterrent effect unlike, say, for terrorists or even the mobsters.

20:19 Yeah, I think it’s a little hard. You have mobsters again, you know, this idea of what is able to deter or not deter, it’s unclear, it’s unscientific, but you know, you get an anecdotal sense of these things. I’m not saying that those things are not a terrible… What I’m saying is, you know, the rich guys in suits, they don’t want to go to prison. Prison is not a fun place, it’s not a happy place, and even short terms of imprisonment are devastating to people like that who are used to living in big houses with a lot of freedom of movement and planes and helicopters and everything else.

20:49 You know, it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it, and if people understand it’s not worth it, I have my, give the example again, I have my billion, I don’t need to cheat to make this twenty million, I can remain free if I make that decision. That’s hopefully the choice we were giving people. And how did you find that those guys were different than, say, the mobsters or the terrorists? I mean, they seem to kind of flip on each other a bit easier, right? Or are there any things that you saw?

21:17 Is that generally, I don’t know if you can generalize, I would say that, um, you know, human nature is interesting, that fraudsters are in some ways worse than other people. I was telling someone recently on this issue, there’s a chapter in the book about cooperating witnesses, and people who follow the Trump investigation, the Russia investigation by the Special Counsel Robert Mueller, are all musing about flipping and cooperating, and is it that, you know, a personal lawyer and so-called fixer Michael Cohen, was he gonna flip, was you’re not gonna flip, how does all this stuff work? You know, it all depends on the person, it all depends on, you know, their own analysis, their own calculation for themselves.

21:57 Is this, maybe you’re referring, this is during the book in which there’s a person named Noah Freeman who was being investigated for insider trading. What, I think we had a reasonable case on him, the FBI approached him, and he did what a lot of people do, he did a cost-benefit analysis and realized, I can be helpful and provide substantial assistance to the government, then maybe I don’t have to go to jail. And he made that decision in an instant, and he made the decision not only to cooperate, to cooperate proactively, meaning he would keep his decision to cooperate secret, he’d be able to work on the street, as they say, and one of the things he was prepared to do is wear a wire, so he wore a wire, not just against anyone but against the person who had been his best man, his friend Don, and but for him flipping in that way, but for him being so quick to cooperate, we would never have been able to charge Don with a crime, because the crime that this person, Donald Longueuil, had committed was insider trading, about which we had fairly weak evidence, but the cooperator Noah got his friend to admit into the wire that in an evening when the Wall Street Journal had reported that there were lots of investigations happening with respect to insider trading out of my office, the Southern District of New York, what Don did was he took a flash drive on which he kept his inside information, secretly smashed it to pieces with a couple of pairs of pliers, walked out of his apartment building and scattered the remains of his hard drive that had the incriminating information into

23:23 The backs of two or three or four garbage trucks. That’s dead to rights evidence, and he was charged with and ended up being convicted of obstruction of justice. Why am I telling the story? Why do I tell the story in the book? Is there so many cases of cooperation, it said, it gave the prosecutors in my office some pause, and these are prosecutors who had dealt with mobsters, who dealt with gangsters, all sorts of people who engage in terrible violence, never batted an eye.

23:53 They didn’t bat an eye at the underlying crime of insider trading, what people do, that that happens, but what they had not seen before was someone who was so willing and prepared in that moment to turn on his best friend in the world. That you don’t see a lot, and then the question is, is that okay? And what does it say when everything about that is legal, everything about that is garden-variety, everyday tool that you use in criminal prosecutions in America, but that these seasoned prosecutors were taken aback by it and it gave them pause, is this very interesting to contemplate, like, well, you know, what is it that makes you drop your jaw at certain kinds of behavior, criminal conduct or being a traitor to your friend?

24:38 It’s just sort of an interesting thing to talk about. Really surprised people to see them do that. Yeah, look, look, there are instances where people flip on their parents, right, and on their siblings. It’s just, I chose that one example to show, which is an interesting, you know, moral decision-making process for everyone. Does that also require the right moment where you go into a room and say, look, this is what we need you to do, with the right emotions, the right structure of what’s gonna happen?

25:05 Yeah, I think what’s delicate, you were getting me to say a lot of things without torturing me and engaging in enhanced interrogation techniques, and you know, we’re just having a friendly interview with all these cameras around, which are intimidating enough, but in the world of criminal law enforcement and intelligence gathering, as I write extensively in the book about interrogation, this is how you get people to talk. You know, you get them to open up by having rapport with them, by treating them as an equal, by making sure that they believe that they’re a person, because they are. You know, all these cops tell me that, you know, people think that it’s my badge and my gun that get people to talk.

25:42 That’s what gets people to talk? It doesn’t, that gets them to shut up. I spent a lot of my time with these cops, and one in particular I’m thinking of would say, trying to get the person I’m talking to forget that I’m a cop, forget I have a badge, forget I have a gun, and think of me just as another person to whom they can unload their problems, unload their secrets, and then they do, and that’s, I think, how that works. You know, there are, I think, cops and agents and intelligence officers who fail at this, hopefully they’re a small number, because they think belligerence and yelling, like you’ve seen in the movies all the time, that that’s what gets the job done.

26:17 Yeah, you know, it’s not, you know, I had, there’s one detective, one of my favorites, Kenny Robb, and so I mentioned in the book, and his approach, you know, was very sort of down-to-earth but firm, and he would, if he could, he was a narcotics detective for a lot of years. Yeah, and I used to work with him on cases when I was a young prosecutor. You’d walk in the room with the person who was taken into custody, if he could, he would get a picture of their family, put the picture of the family on the table, “I put this here,” and he would leave the room, let the person contemplate that for a moment.

26:48 He would come back and he would say, look, I understand that you’re a man, and you could say to yourself, I’m a man, so I’m gonna keep my mouth shut, I’m not gonna talk about these other people who I did these crimes with, or you could say, I’m a man and I want to be there for my daughter’s graduation, and I want to be there for my, you know, 15th wedding anniversary. You could say, I’m a man and I want to be there for when my father is in the hospital because he’s getting old. You choose what kind of man you want to be.

27:15 And he would leave again. And you know what, he didn’t yell, he didn’t scream, he didn’t lie, he didn’t pretend, he didn’t browbeat, he laid out a stark choice. In some ways it’s very respectful, it’s like, you’re a thinking person, here are your choices and here’s what’s gonna happen to you, and I don’t have to scream at you, I don’t have to play good cop, bad cop, this is what it is. And you know what, that was an effective technique. Hmm, wow.

27:42 Did you watch the show Billions? I’ve watched some of the show, because there’s some real eerie similarities, of people wearing wires, against… I know, but there are also some dissimilarities. Okay, right, like, can you comment? If I recused myself, I would remain recused.

27:56 I wouldn’t sort of… there are a lot of unethical things that I understand the character of the U.S. Attorney does which I did not do, right? Is it, but thanks for better drama, it does. is that weird though, when people see the show and then they just assume that you’ve done all those things and they’re like, well, it’s weird when people see the show and they assume I’ve done certain things with my wife, which I don’t want to spoil the show for people, but I haven’t.

28:18 Not to overshare, but there are many of those things that I happen to island, but it’s basically, you know, Steve Cohen of SAC vs. you. I mean, there’s no, I don’t know people. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if that was the, I think it’s an amalgam of a lot of different things, right? Yeah, but look, there are people who take art more seriously than they should. I mean, they’re having people who have said, because the deal attorney in the show is the son of a wealthy man, and somebody said to a friend of mine, I had no idea Preet’s father was wealthy.

28:45 I’m like, no, it’s fiction, it’s not, it’s not even if it is, and I don’t know that it is, loosely based on something, doesn’t mean every particular, and certainly many particulars, that there are resemblances. This is a dangerous thing, I think. In Ukraine, like, some guy that just played the president on a TV show just got elected as president. So when the drama goes into the lawyer life story, it’s hard to send my wife. I think Paul Giamatti would make a fine Attorney General of the United States, better than one of the last guys.

29:13 Can you talk on this whole, the whole hedge fund phenomenon? Cuz when I started on Wall Street there really were no hedge funds, and all of the trading activities were kind of in a proprietary area of the bank, and then as the years went on, I think it started with Long-Term Capital maybe in the late 90s, they started kind of moving up to Connecticut and out to where you had these guys that would now dress down, and this is a kind of master of the universe kind of gone a little crazy without a balance sheet and customers and all this other weird stuff. Yeah, I mean, can you, because that kind of really interpret of history, are you probably in a better position to talk about that?

29:45 Just like, you know, people that don’t understand. I mean, and those are got a lot of the people you prosecuted was these hedge funds opposed to banks? Yeah, well, because it depends on where you find the crime. What I don’t understand about hedge funds, and no offense, and I’ve friends who work in the hedge fund industry, and I think, you know, a lot of hedge funds did things the right way, and even a hedge fund, for some people didn’t, most people did things the right way, I’m not saying it was a hundred percent criminality, but it’s an odd business model, right?

30:09 It’s supposed to be a place where people who have a certain amount of means and meet certain threshold requirements of wealth and income and can sustain a certain amount of risk can invest money and get a better return than they can get elsewhere. And I used to know this number off the top of my head, is I thought it was interesting, the number of hedge funds in America who beat the S&P 500 index fund, which is where I invest my money, actually, although I’ve never said that before. What’s the percentage of hedge funds that beat the S&P 500 over the course of time?

30:36 I think very few. Yeah, so I understand why people are wasting their money and paying all those fees and why people are becoming billionaires with hedge funds when they mostly suck. You here to comment? No, one of my buddies went into a hedge fund after I left the street and he would be like, yeah, Brian, I made six million this year and eight million in 10 min. I was just like, what?

30:52 Like, these weren’t usual Wall Street trader numbers. I’m like, what are you doing, what are the returns? It just didn’t make sense to me, and after about six or eight years I don’t think it made sense to investors. I think some of that was, you know, something we won’t see. Yeah, I mean, but I think, I think you have to be ahead when they’re really hits, and look, I wish I had, I wish I could remember what the chart said and, you know, where on the hedge fund chart the S&P 500 was and how many people could be, I mean, if I were 10, it’s remarkable to me that you could do better than most hedge funds, I think this is true.

31:24 Yeah, you’ll edit this out if it’s not, that you could do better by just mindlessly doing dollar cost averaging of a certain amount of money twice a month, which is what I do, and see your gains over the course of time rather than try to pick and choose which hedge fund, how many fees, in my, what kind of fees am I gonna pay one year. Yeah, maybe wonder, you do know better than a lot of others, but then you’re underwater the next year, it’s very volatile, you know. I don’t, I don’t see the sense of it.

31:53 I know what you mean. There’s a theme in the show where, you know, the prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney General, is, you know, on everybody working in the office is always like, okay, we can 10x our income if we go into private practice. Oh, yeah, or more, or more, 20x. Yeah.

32:08 How do you work in that environment, how do you keep your people, and how do you not even be personally tempted by something like that? Oh well, cuz it’s the best place in the world to work if you care about the law and if you care about public service. Look, that office, and I, you know, you’ll forgive me for being, you know, parochially proud of the Southern District of New York, you know, some people have said the book is a love letter to the office, and I take that as a compliment.

32:31 You know, I’m hugely biased in favor of that place, cuz it helped make me. Some of the best people I’ve ever met in my life work there. The place is more selective than any place that I’ve ever been. So just to give you a sense of what the Southern District is like, basically you have to be, you know, incredibly credentialed, incredibly smart, we also have to have good character and good judgment, and have to be one of the best lawyers of your generation to get a job there.

32:59 Do we make mistakes and not hire some people who should have gotten in? I’m sure that’s true, but I’ll give you a sense, and you’ve worked at a lot of places, you probably understand what the yield rate is, right? Over the course of seven and a half years, I think I made about a hundred and eighty offers to young men and women, asking them, you know, accepting their application to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and out of 180, do you know how many accepted on the spot on the phone?

33:26 I think 179. I think 100… I think the other one needed to check with the spouse for another day. I’m not aware of any other institution, including MIT, including Harvard, Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs, I’m not aware of any other institution that has a basically 100% acceptance rate. Nope.

33:44 And also, by the way, on the phone in the moment, no, like, well, how long do I have to accept the offer, let me see what this other office is saying. If we made you an offer, you took it because you knew that was the best place in the world to work. That sounds very… I remember sitting next to a billionaire once, his name I won’t mention, who asked me who our labor competition was, and as I don’t have any, our only problem with labor and competition is sometimes some other offices would accelerate an application ahead of ours and someone would accept another offer if we weren’t quick enough, because they knew that there was a long shot and they don’t want the other offer to expire.

34:20 People get exploding offers from other places to prevent them from coming to the Southern District of New York. So when you say how do you get people who, you know, to give up all that money, because it’s the greatest, most prestigious place, I think, to work, and also because of the satisfaction of the work. Maybe the job every day is to just try to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons, which is a mantra that I repeat in the book over and over and over again, and it sounds corny, and was it always successful?

34:46 No, but it’s an amazing feeling to be able to do that work where you’re not a typical lawyer who has to represent a client who maybe you don’t agree with, or maybe you have to take positions that are not necessarily the wisest or smartest or, you know, the best laid and supported in the law. You represent only the public. If you don’t believe in the case, you don’t bring the case, and you get to work with some of the smartest, greatest people around. Oh, and also, by the way, really, really funny people.

35:11 I have persuaded people to leave behind, you know, multi-million dollar practices. All of my criminal division chiefs, you know, two of my deputy U.S. Attorneys, I think I persuaded to come back from private practice to give up seven figures to work for, you know, low six figures. It’s still a lot of money, you can still, like, raise a family, and so nobody should be complaining about it, but you’re leaving a lot of money on the table that you’re never gonna get back.

35:39 Now, the corollary to that, to complete the thought, is, you know, we do have more exit than some other offices. You know, people will come there and they’re idealistic and they want to do a good job, but they will feel, after a period of time, as I’m sure is reflected on the show, you know, five, six, seven, eight years, they’ll feel the pull of, you know, well, I have this opportunity, you know, I’m raising a family, housing is really expensive in New York City, I’m gonna take the plunge. But you know what, they all do it, not all, but almost all of them do it with some reluctance, and they’re sad when they leave the office, and they spend years there.

36:15 It’s been years here. I mean, not, you know, there are some other Southern offices where people, they go there and they never leave because the same opportunities don’t await them in private practice in, for example, Montana, not to pick on Montana, but no one’s making six million dollars a year as a lawyer in Montana. A lot of people are in New York. Yeah. Can you describe what the Southern District of New York means to a lot of people that don’t understand the clout of that office, in the history of that office, because for us it just sounds like a district in a US state.

36:44 I know it, you know, look, so it’s a storied office in America. I would sometimes remind people when I swore them in, in front of their families, the legacy of the place and how long it’s been a part of American culture and the legal firmament. So back in the day, you know, there are four districts in New York: northern, southern, eastern and western. Back in the old days when the country was at its founding, there was just the District of New York, which then later got split when the population increased, but for all intents and purposes the Southern District of New York, or the District of New York, commenced at the founding of the Republic, 1789.

37:18 I will tell people the story, and we used to have on display in the office a copy of a piece of paper that was a handwritten nomination form by the first President of the United States, George Washington, to the Senate, referring to his nominations for the Southern, you know, that I’m sorry, that he was Attorney for the District of New York, and the other person on the form that you may remember and have heard of, for Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. So, you know, the storied history goes back well over 200 years, and then over the course of time that office has done and has graduated some of the most impressive people, done some of the most impressive cases that office prosecuted, the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, now, no, back in the middle of the last century, treason, for treason, and you know, people have their views on that case, but I’m just saying the highest profile cases you ever heard of, many of them have been prosecuted by that office.

38:12 And the people who have served as U.S. Attorney, including one of the all-time greats, Henry Stimson, probably nobody knows who he is, he’s a name that people have forgotten. Henry Stimson was a U.S. Attorney in the early 1900s, maybe 1906 to 1909 or whatever, and that’s a big, important, prestigious job, probably the biggest job I will ever have. He went on to be Secretary of State and Secretary of War.

38:35 There are people who have been in that office have gone on to be Supreme Court justice, governor, mayor, Attorney General of the United States, you know, all sorts of things. And the reason I say all these things is not to brag about the office but to impress upon people that when you get into that office, you were humbled by the opportunity and you are aware that you’re sort of part of history and you’re part of a reputational legacy that you hopefully strive every day not to let down. I would always tell the story of my office, the U.S.

39:03 Attorney’s Office in that building, the headquarters at One St. Andrew’s Plaza in Manhattan, right next to police headquarters on the one side and across from FBI headquarters on the other side and the courthouse on yet the other side, and on the 8th floor, for decades now, is a wall, and on the wall are the portraits of all U.S. Attorneys going back, I think, to 1900. And when I got the job, I described some of this in the book, you know, the feeling of sort of holy, holy cow, how do I have this job, particularly since I didn’t look like most of the rest of them and didn’t have a name that sounded like most of the rest of them.

39:36 You walk by those portraits every morning to your office and you think they’re kind of looking at me funny and they’re thinking to themselves, who’s this kid? You know, I was 40 years old when I got the job, which is young, it’s young, you know, it’s young, I think, for that position, it’s young for that responsibility. It’s not young in that office. That office is full of youth and vigor and there’s a lot of young folks there. We hire folks, you know, typically in their very late 20s or early 30s, so I wasn’t, you know, many generations older than they, but yeah, he’s pretty young for, for a kid born in India, grew up in New Jersey, first Indian American to have that job, appointed by the first black president in the history of the United States.

40:16 So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of feeling about it, there’s a lot of specialness about that place. How does something like that happen and what was the road like to get there? I mean, like you said, born in India. Yeah, well, so look, you know, I believe in fortuity, you know, I also believe that you make your own luck and you do a good job and it gets noticed, but I also believe that you can be in the right place at the right time, and I have no illusions about how, but for certain, for two, I would not have had the job.

40:41 I worked in the Senate for Senator Charles Schumer and I think did a good job for him, I think he thought I did an excellent job for him, and when Obama got elected he recommended me, as is the tradition, the state senators will recommend people for the District Court bench, for the, for judgeships. What I tried to convey in the book is it’s the thinking process, or a lot of thinking that goes on as opposed to, you know, issuing of subpoenas right and left willy-nilly, and deliberate thought and moral reasoning and ethical, you know, rumination sounds boring, but that’s how justice is done, that’s how you make sure that injustice is not done, that’s how you make sure that miscarriages don’t happen, because that can… I tell a lot of stories about such a… stories about great things that we did and victories, how in some cases things go wrong and how in some cases it’s a closed question what the right thing, you know, to do is.

41:38 And so in that place I think you know, you make sure you hire people who have a sense of right and wrong, you hire people who have a sense of proportion, who have a sense of judgment, and you take cases as they come. With respect to your question, how you decide what to do, what to go for, so I didn’t show up, you know, with 300 people on the first day and answer, like, okay, now what do we do? You inherit things that are ongoing, right, there’s continuity in U.S.

42:02 Attorneys’ offices, in agencies, you know, a new Secretary of State comes in and that person doesn’t inherit, I mean doesn’t is bringing, like, okay, I brought my 5,000 new people from the farm, let’s figure out foreign policy now. There’s a structure. There are cases that I inherited, my successor inherited cases that I have begun, that began under my tenure, and you decide which things you’re gonna pursue with the same vigor, how you’re gonna, you know, allocate resources.

42:25 The U.S. Attorney, for good or ill, is generally not the person who says, go after that person, go after that person, because that’s not how it works, and I’m not the one, the leader of any office is not the one who’s getting into the trenches. And I got, you know, I got blamed for certain kinds of prosecutions and I got credit for other kinds of prosecutions, probably not deserving of either one of those things. The leader of an institution, whether it’s a U.S.

42:50 Attorney’s Office or a bank or a school or a college or anything else, no, sets the tone for the place, sets the agenda for the place, populates the place, promotes the right people, is the good public face of the office, makes sure that there’s internal harmony and internal morale, and then decides, you know, what things to abandon, what things to pursue. I don’t mean particular enforcement actions but overall policy things. So, for example, the Mafia, you know, always a problem in New York and a lot of other places, slightly less of a problem, you know, in the last 20 years, still out there, still need to have people dedicated to that.

43:25 So as they began to ease, you know, a problem to public safety, another thing began to grow, and that’s the cyber threat, which is also difficult to stay on top of and also requires a lot of tech savvy. So when you ask the question, what will you decide to go after, you look at what the threats are. Terrorism too, and also that threat changes as well, and it used to be in the early days of my time when I was a line prosecutor, I did terrorism cases as well, it’s organized, sophisticated terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and then others like AQAP or al-Shabaab, but then you also have to start thinking about the lone wolves and the people who become radicalized in ways that are hard to trace back to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

44:06 Those things are in some ways much easier to deal with and detect. So, like anything else, you look at what the threats are, and if the threats are homegrown terrorism then you have to dedicate resources to that. If the threats are huge cyber intrusions into infrastructure like we found in America, or, you know, financial institutions and how they go back to any things, or retail operations, or entertainment moguls like Sony, we have the Sony hack, then that’s how you decide to spend time and energy in those things, if you have, as occurred in the United States.

44:39 Yes, what is going on in the UK on this? I feel badly that I don’t know. The opioid crisis is a huge burdening problem. At some point in the middle of my tenure we started to realize that we need to maybe be more aggressive on opioids and figure out who the bad pharmacists are and figure out if we should have a public education campaign. The only public service announcement I ever recorded for television during my time as U.S.

45:03 Attorney was on opioids, and trying to educate parents and educate doctors and educate pharmacists on how to make sure that they didn’t fall victim to this, you know, really galloping scourge in the country. So it’s common sense, you look and see what the problems are, you look and see what the public safety issues are, and then you apply resources to those things. And we didn’t get to public corruption yet. You know, I think we had the most aggressive public corruption run in decades in that office, if ever.

45:29 We arrested, convicted both the leader of the state Senate in New York and the leader of the New York State Assembly in New York, one was a Democrat, one was a Republican, they were convicted at trial within 11 days of each other. There was a massive, you know, I think groundbreaking and effective thing that happened in New York, and the way you do it is, unlike a lot of law firms and maybe a lot of other business conglomerates, you staff everything leanly. If you have, you know, the best in the business, which I think I had in that office, you know, the number of people who were assigned to any one of those things, there’s like three people, two people, sometimes four at a maximum, and then you work with your law enforcement agencies, but we didn’t staff things like I remembered a law firm, we have, you know, 15 people.

46:17 I mean, I would see when I was a young prosecutor, thinking one of the reasons I like being in the U.S. Attorney’s Office is there’s a guy being prosecuted in Frank Patron, the trial team for the Southern District of New York I think was two assistant U.S. Attorneys, two lawyers, and I think they had a paralegal, and then I looked in the courtroom and I saw how many lawyers the defendant had and then how many lawyers were also sitting in the courtroom as backup and how many staff and paralegals and lawyers were sitting there representing the institution for which he worked, and I start doing the rough math in my head and it, I think this was not too much of an exaggeration, and also there are armies of lawyers back at the office, you know, doing other support work and everything else.

46:58 You know, the government that everyone says is powerful, NAB, all these resources, that’s sort of true, but sometimes you see this play out in court and it’s not quite what you think, and I think it was the case, if I was doing the math correctly, that the amount of billable time, the amount of revenue generated by the lawyers who had some association with the defense that day approximated the entire annual salary of one of the prosecutors on the case. That’s telling you how much cooler it is, I think, to be on the side of the good guys. I mean, look, they are us, I don’t mean to minimize the power and ability of the government, the government’s massive resources when it chooses to mobilize them, but there are also cases where the person who is in the dock has more resources than the government has.

47:45 You know, it runs both ways. President Putin, I had Bill Browder in here talking about this week. Okay. Yeah, he was great, he would not drink anything I gave him, it was morally careful. Yeah, that’s right.

47:59 Oh yeah, all right, but I be like, Bill is careful because he potentially has what he has, Putin is an enemy of you. Yeah, helped with the Magnitsky, and gave me a funny feeling too when I walked in here. Did I? Yeah, at the water look clean. Is it, do you think twice when someone like Putin is involved with something like that?

48:19 You’ve been banned now from traveling there. My ban is, you know, stupid. We prosecuted someone, Viktor Bout, honorably and fairly, he’s a Russian national, and Putin had to respond to a sanctions list the Americans put forward, and they decided to put a number of people who were involved in the prosecution of Viktor Bout, obviously I was the U.S. Attorney at the time, on the list. I think Bill Browder’s is a different kind of figure and heroic in many ways, and has now made it his life’s work to expose corruption of oligarchs and to vindicate the memory of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and, you know, and it has really hurt Putin where it matters, you know, economically.

48:57 It’s a powerful piece of technology, the Magnitsky Act. Well, that’s what I call it. It is, yeah, yeah, no, it is, you can really hit people where it hurts. Yeah, all around the world, right. Yeah, I was building Barbies with Bill this week, and I think, you know, he was saying what he always says, and that is, you know, the folks in Russia, oligarchs and others, what they really care about is money.

49:16 You can talk and you can say stuff and they won’t necessarily, you know, take action against you if you’re just sort of a gadfly and you write your columns and you make your protests, but you do something that takes away their money, well, then you could be on the death list. Now he is in urine, on the persona non grata list. Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be fine, but I’m not gonna have anything more to drink, sorry about that. Do you ever worry about your safety with mob bosses and crazy hedge fund people and terrorists and all that?

49:47 I mean, no, not really. You can’t, look, there’s a lot of people who take a lot of precautions and we took precautions and made sure we were careful, and every once in a while when there’s a threat to the U.S. Attorney or anyone else, you took it very, very seriously, and again, you know, in those circumstances there are a lot of resources to take care of it and investigate it. Sometimes it turns out to be false, but you know, if you’re worried about that kind of thing then you shouldn’t be in the job, the same way that if you’re squeamish about guns you shouldn’t join, you know, the army, if you’re squeamish about you know, doing street policing you shouldn’t become a cop.

50:20 You know, it comes with the territory and I think you just deal with it. A lot of people criticized the office because there weren’t any prosecutions for the financial crisis. What do you say to people? Well, there were, but I think the criticism that has been lodged broadly, and I talk about this in the book as well, I think pretty forthrightly, in a lengthy chapter called “Walking Away,” that there were no heads of financial institutions who were sent to prison for conduct related to the financial crisis.

50:49 It’s a frustrating thing, I can never give a fully satisfactory answer to people who just think in their heart that many, many people at the highest levels should have gone to prison, should have been separated from their liberty, and I try to explain, as I do in the book, and I won’t do, you know, what justice here. People should understand that the folks, that, you know, the line prosecutors I’ve been talking about, the career FBI agents, IRS agents, Securities and Exchange Commission people who worked with not just my office but many offices, lots of different offices, were pursuing investigations of financial institutions in connection with other companies as well, ratings agencies, in connection with the financial crisis, and they had a frustration also, they suffered in the financial crisis also, so they had every personal and professional incentive to try to hold people accountable under the criminal law if they could.

51:38 I’m not unaware of any case where, you know, a pre para U.S. Attorney or an Attorney General somewhere said to a group of, you know, seasoned, hard-working, dedicated career prosecutors and agents, no, we’re not going to bring that case that you recommend we bring. The recommendations weren’t made, and part of the reason is you couldn’t find evidence of a crime. You could find evidence of recklessness, evidence of negligence, evidence of carelessness, evidence of greed, evidence of corruption, evidence of bad practices, evidence of sharp practices, that doesn’t necessarily a crime make.

52:14 There are also ways in which heads of financial institutions have the ability to, you know, have plausible deniability, or lots of people of financial institutions. The examples I give, these are not exhaustive, to seek, you know, a simplified example, in order to send someone to prison for a white-collar crime, for fraud, you came to show that people lost money. You can’t just show that people were not perfect in the representations of the values of things, you have to show that that person had criminal intent personally, not just because something in the institution happened three levels down.

52:46 You have to show that the person that you think should go to jail, he himself or she herself, directed things to happen. That’s hard to do in financial institutions, just like it’s hard to do in mob families, just like it’s hard to do in gang organizations as well. And then you have a further complication, again, this is just in some cases and I’m overly simplifying it, you know, a lot of these financial institutions, whether they were acting in good faith or not, they had third parties like accounting firms and law firms who they, who were asked, do you bless this representation about the value of the, I understand this were working on on the street, do you bless this financial transaction?

53:24 And if they said yes, then it, even if it’s not in good faith, and I think a lot of them probably weren’t, some of them probably wanted the fee and they wanted to say everything’s fine, you have to worry about it and we’re authorizing it, now try to take the blunt instrument of the criminal law with the high standard of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, to a unanimous jury, where you put the executive, imagine the executive’s defense, it’s it’s not only a plausible defense, it’s almost an airtight defense, whether you like it or not, and that is, look, you know, we’re not the lawyers, we’re not the accountants, we wanted to do this transaction and we asked, you know, this funny, this accounting firm that everyone knows and it’s a respected accounting firm, and they said okay, so I didn’t have criminal intent.

54:08 You may not like what we did, you may have thought it was like kind of sneaky and thought it was kind of slippery, and by the way, a lot of the people who bought you know this junk, this securitized financial instruments, they were sophisticated businesspeople too. Mmm, you know, ultimately, you know, all of us were victimized by it, but in many ways the immediate victims, right, the immediate people in the chain who took the junk would have testified that we didn’t think it was junk, even though some of the people who are selling it didn’t have a high, you know, appraisal of the things that they were selling. In those circumstances, whether people like it or not, it’s very difficult to prove a criminal case.

54:46 Mm-hmm. Does it still bother you, that whole period? Well, look, the only thing that bothers me, and I don’t mean to sound trailers, is if people say that there was a lack of confidence on the part of thousands of people who work in the government who were too stupid to figure out how to make a criminal case against the CEO of a bank. You know, I don’t agree with that, but I can accept that, and people can say that, and they’ve written a lot of things and they take their shots out of frustration, I think, but no one has ever shown me or anyone else, you know, a document that lays out a winnable criminal case against someone who’s 11 levels up, you know, at the top of the food chain at a financial institution.

55:29 What does upset me from time to time is the suggestion that we were too afraid or were too weak or there was some reason why, you know, we knew we had a case, we signed on to that, to me is like, is idiotic, as we’ve been discussing this interview, you know, we went after al-Qaeda, we went after the mob, we went after al-Shabaab, we went after Crips, went after Bloods, and I think I, in the chapter this way, you know, a few men in suits did not frighten us. Do you think you’ll one day sit down, have a drink with Steve Cohen and laugh about that? It seems unlikely.

56:00 Okay, see in jail, he’s not, he’s not okay. Dit, and cuz he was allowed to keep trading, we never personally prosecuted him, just the company, he was never prosecuted criminally. No. Okay, did that bother you? I don’t know that bothers me, this is odd orientation about this being personal or not personal.

56:21 Look, there are cases, you either bring them or you don’t, it’s very binary, you don’t have shades of grey, and you know, we know this in the Mueller report, and we know, you know, Bill Barr, the Attorney General, talks about this, the Mueller report is different cuz you’re talking about the president and he has immunity based on this policy at the Justice Department and he’s amenable to accountability through impeachment, but the garden-variety case, you charge the person or you know, charge the person, and if you don’t have the the evidence to charge a person, that is what it is, and you take the criticism and you sort of take it on the chin, uh, and that’s that, and you know, you don’t get by if you got bothered by cases that there was no evidence to bring, then you spend a lot of time being bothered.

57:04 There’s lots of cases that aren’t able to be brought, and I suppose there might be a case where you absolutely knew that the person was guilty and you had the evidence but then something happened to it and you couldn’t bring the case, I suppose that could bring you some frustration, but those cases don’t come to mind. Case you’re most proud of? I don’t, I don’t rank them, I don’t rank them that way. No favorite children, no favorite children, and I also don’t have, like, least favorite, or save you some trouble, don’t also, don’t ask me, you know, you know, most disappointing moment, most disappointing case, I don’t do the superlatives, I’m not good at that at all.

57:41 Okay, as if your life wasn’t already interesting enough, then you have a relationship with Mr. Donald Trump. I was wondering if you… I wouldn’t call it a relationship. Okay, I was one of… you could just tell us what what happened with him from, I think, meetings originally in 2016 up until now, to just ordinarily, when a president gets elected of a different party, especially all of the U.S. Attorneys were appointed by the president of the prior administration, you leave in an orderly fashion over a period of time, to probably, there’s a change of the guard when there’s new press.

58:12 Yeah, it doesn’t happen overnight, it happens over a period of time, and you know, so it’s orderly and there’s some continuity, and you know, cases are not affected or harmed by the transition process. So I assumed when Donald Trump got elected that that was it and we would be done, and then eight days later, you know, out of the blue, he contacted the senator for whom I worked just some years earlier, Senator Schumer, and says, do you think, you know, Preet would be willing to stay? I think he’s terrific.

58:38 Senator Schumer said, I think Preet’s terrific. And then I had this, you know, odd meeting at President-elect Donald Trump’s request to come to Trump Tower and talk with him about staying on, and so I did, and the whole gang was there, Kushner and Kushner and Bannon, Bannon were there to greet me on the 26th floor when I showed up. The president-elect was running late, they were lovely, meeting for 15 minutes where he praised the office, praised my work, said good things, that he’d been reading about the work of the office and my work for some time, shook my hand, asked me to stay, and I said I would, after I, you know, I gave a short speech about the independence of the office, I thought was important for me to say, and how we’re not political and we don’t care if you’re Democrat or Republican, and presumably you have confidence in me going forward because you like the way we have done the work before, and I know my commitment is to do the work of the, obviously, the office in the same way that I have over the past number of years, and I accepted the offer to continue on for another term.

59:38 The only weird thing that happened in the meeting, you know, which had consequences later, was that the president-elect pushed over, you know, a yellow pad of Post-its, I don’t know what you call them here, but the little stickies, yeah, and asked me for my phone number, in my office and cell number, for that was unusual and odd because clearly somebody had my phone number, because that’s how the meeting got arranged in the first place, that’s how meetings get arranged, and no one seemed to bat an eye, and I, you know, I made a request from the future commander-in-chief to put my phone numbers on this yellow stickies and back across the table. Let’s… didn’t quite a meeting in while, he said, was there press here when you came up? And I said there was.

1:00:25 He said, well, are they gonna see you, do they recognize me? I said yes they did, and I didn’t, what I didn’t tell him was when I came to the elevator, to the lift, not where all the press was gathering behind a velvet rope, someone yelled out, Mr. Bharara, are you here to serve a subpoena? I didn’t tell them they had recognized me, I told they’d recognize me, I didn’t tell him what the joke was, which is kind of interesting and ironic now that we’re two years further on or two-and-a-half years further on.

1:00:51 And then he called me a couple times, which was odd given that he should have been busy and certainly too busy to call the sitting United States Attorney with whom he had no prior relationship, when that sort of goes against the chain of command and the hierarchy, and when that he was an attorney had and still does have natural jurisdiction over the Trump Organization, Trump Foundation, various businesses and other things that are important, it’s all based in New York, all that, it’s all based in New York. It doesn’t mean that’s the exclusive office who could do it, but that’s a little peculiar. I didn’t like it, I thought it was unusual, it set off a red flag in my mind.

1:01:30 I advised actually President Trump’s transition team, feel responsible for the Justice Department transition that had happened, and you know, made a record of it in my own office because I didn’t know if and when someone was gonna say that’s untoward, or if the president was ever gonna say to do something that I shouldn’t do or ask about a case or do something that crossed a line. And yeah, and there’s reason to think that that might have happened in retrospect. In particular, you know, that Mueller report is full of examples where people in the White House on the staff told the president, don’t call the Justice Department, don’t have dinner alone with Jim Comey, don’t have that conversation, because yeah, he has the constitutional authority to do whatever he wants, but it doesn’t look good, and it looks like you’re trying to short-circuit the process, and it looks like you’re trying to put a thumb on the scale, potentially for people who you know, you don’t like in one direction, of people you do like in another direction, and that’s bad for him.

1:02:25 And then came the time, yeah, you know, some weeks after he got inaugurated, that his secretary, the secretary for the White House, called my office on, as March 9th of 2017, I left a message that the president would like you to return the call. I consulted with my deputy for an hour, and it might seem odd that you would think twice about returning the call, the president United States, the commander in chief, the head of all government, but I did have pause because I didn’t know why he was calling. There was no set up for the call.

1:02:57 The Attorney General was not involved in the call. There had been, you know, swirling suggestions about investigating various aspects of Donald Trump’s business and the, you know, emoluments and the way he was separating his money and all sorts of things swirling around. How’s that gonna look? Even if it will appear rude not to return the call, how is it gonna look if later people found out, oh yeah, Preet and Trump have been having, you know, private conversations to which no one else was privy while all these other things are swirling about and calls for investigations are happening?

1:03:28 That that doesn’t sound innocent even if it had been, in those instances. And so we decided, after going through all the permutations and possibilities, that I shouldn’t return the call, which is not an easy thing to decide when it’s the person who obviously will be angry about it and who rightfully would take the position that, well, you only have your job, the only continuing it because of me, and you’re too rude to return the call. By the way, before I did that, I consulted with Jeff Sessions’ office, the Attorney General’s office, spoke to his chief of staff, explained the situation.

1:04:03 He also, that the Attorney General’s chief of staff also was taken aback and like, well, I don’t know anything about that, why is the president calling the local U.S. Attorney and the Attorney General’s office has no idea that the call is taking place? That seemed funny to me at the time and fishy to me at the time, it seems more fishy now, and I like my decision even better now when you read all these instances where Donald Trump reportedly, and I think credibly, pulled Comey aside and said, I don’t want these other guys in the room, can I have your personal loyalty?

1:04:32 On one occasion, can you maybe lay off of the prosecution of Michael Flynn in a related occasion. That’s the kind of thing he did, you know, we had reports where Donald Trump is acting inappropriately, asking that, you know, people who are in the Justice Department to investigate and maybe prosecute his former rival Hillary Clinton. That’s the kind of thing that he does, and very early on I became worried about it, and I didn’t know how I was gonna explain that phone call even to those innocent.

1:04:58 There was also the occasion, if those, you know, people who follow it closely remember, where Loretta Lynch, the then Attorney General, met on an airplane Bill Clinton because it happened to be on this at the same airport at the same time on the tarmac. Donald Trump said over and over and over again at campaign rallies that was inappropriate, they must have discussed the case, the fix was in, because a short time later Jim Comey announced that there would be no recommendation of a prosecution of Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump himself pointed to a side conversation when a pending thing was going on and said that’s no fairies, that’s the first that was in my mind also.

1:05:35 So even though there was no good, you know, I think reaction, I decided not to call him back and call the White House, not to speak to him, at least call the White House secretary back and said, you know, with the agreement of the Attorney General’s office, I think it’s not appropriate for me to speak to the president, at least not until I know what’s going on, it’s done through proper channels. And then the next day I was asked to resign. You probably the only person that never called my back in the history of the world, besides maybe Kim Jong-un, but the funny thing is, you know, I say, I say all the time, I thought about that, and you know, even though it may have been the proximate cause of my losing the best job I will ever have and have ever had, I’m more proud of that decision than any, than at any other time, because what was he doing?

1:06:22 Why was he calling me? And maybe he was innocent to a point, but you know, based on all sorts of other evidence we’ve seen since, his view of people high up in law enforcement is to protect him, not to uphold the law, not to, you know, engage in law enforcement in an independent way. It’s in the Mueller report, Donald Trump literally saying, you know, about Jeff Sessions, and to Jeff Sessions, your job is to protect me, you’re supposed to protect me, why are you recused from the investigation that might harm me, the implication being you’re my guy.

1:06:51 You know, he says things in the report, whatever you think about Eric Holder, of Bobby Kennedy said, you don’t think that Eric Holder protected the president? You don’t think the Bobby Kennedy protected the president? You know, whatever you think of that allegation, the idea that he was calling me for some innocent reason and not to be my friend or not to have me be his friend and do right by him, if and when, look at, look at how history has unfolded, if and when maybe there was an investigation of his personal lawyer, maybe Michael Cohen, what do you think he would have expected from me?

1:07:21 That how then, by the way, would it have looked if it became known that there were calls that I took and accepted and spoke to the president on the phone amidst an investigation of Michael Cohen? Not right, it seems odd, I think, to a lot of people’s ears, and I’ve got into arguments with people about this, you know, people in business, he’s your boss, right? He hired you, right? Yes. He kept you on?

1:07:42 Yes. He could fire you? Yes. You don’t return his call? Kind of an… are you…

1:07:47 I’m like, I’ll explain the kind of… I am, and then I go through this. It takes a while to understand the executive branch and the judicial branch, and also to explain they can look, part of the reason, what the book too is, you know, not all decisions are so easy. People say, well, obviously return the call, or obviously you arrest, or obviously you charge, you know, the head of JP Morgan because the financial crisis is happening, I’ve seen then, these things are not so obvious, and if you have people in there neither one likes the answer, and we can have a discussion about it, like you and I are having, but you know, this idea that you, I think you want people like the men and women in the Southern District of New York who don’t just run off half-cocked.

1:08:25 You actually think, we know it, I didn’t return the call, but I, we talked about it for like an hour and 15 minutes. Is it difficult? Yes, in a way, you have to go through the decision tree, you have to consider the options, you have to go back and forth, you know, my initial inclination was to return the call for all the reasons we’re discussing, right? But sometimes your first, you know, knee-jerk reaction is not the right one, right? Whether it’s in response to a question at a news conference or it’s how to respond to somebody who hasn’t, you know, done their job as well as you wanted them to do, look, the first or, you know, by like, you know, the great forum for bad first takes is Twitter, and even on that, you know, platform it pays to take a deep breath, think about it before you act.

1:09:08 But if you had called them back, you probably would still have that job. No, I don’t know about that, you know, at some point you know, he might have soured. I mean, at some point, again, I don’t actually know if I, if I was asked to leave because of that, because a lot of the other people were asked to leave also. Um, it’s hard to believe it didn’t hasten my departure. I think at some point the the administration became paranoid about the quote-unquote deep state, anybody who had some association with Barack Obama, and he just, you know, he may have just thought better of his idea to have me in place, and then when I didn’t return his call, what could be more disloyal than not returning the call?

1:09:43 Maybe that sealed the deal, but I actually have no idea what he was thinking. Fast forward to today, what do you make of him now? Just checking the time very ostentatiously while the cameras are rolling, cuz there’s no clock. I see, how you have no clock in here? I wait to have a clock in here, third degree can go on for many, many hours.

1:10:00 Their degree, you’re the king of the third degree, and even in that arrogance we’re peeler police, classic. Uh, see, there’s a clock, so the guy can see how much passage of time. Season have a next level here in London, but you’re forgetting who I am, right? What’s your question? My question was, fast forward to today, now you see everything that’s happened with Trump, the Mueller investigation, all that stuff that’s coming out, do you assess him differently, or is it all now kind of makes sense, what you initially felt?

1:10:25 Oh, I think, I think any concerns that you have about his undermining of institutions, the way he denigrates the press, the way he singles out particular members of the judiciary for attack and vitriol, how he publicly states his belief in the word of Vladimir Putin over the intelligence community in his own country and the FBI, the premier law enforcement agency, as though in his own country, all those things, I think we’ve had concerns from going way back, I think they just become, you know, more concrete over time. Does this happen because he comes from this New York-style business background as opposed to all of our other, what happens, does what happens is this, this kind of breaking protocol, this like no, no, this, look, look, this this idea that Donald Trump, because if you’re saying does he deliberately break protocol and that’s how ways, cuz he’s brash, or he doesn’t know the protocol so he’s to be forgiven for, I’m not sure which one you’re saying, does that review as to one of those?

1:11:26 I mean, you know, part of it’s a cultural thing, like everyone knows that the president doesn’t do this and these officers don’t do this and you don’t do that, and he comes in and just says, I’m gonna do whatever I want to do. We’ve never seen this before. You know, he’s not constrained by anything, and because I think, not to be an armchair psychologist, all this is a very nice armchair, thank you, in which to be a psychologist, his you know, he’s never been the head of a publicly traded company, right?

1:11:53 His will be done is what he’s always understood, whether it’s to steer his company towards bankruptcy as he’s done like a number of times. You know, if you look at the allegations made against the Trump Foundation and by the New York State Attorney General, it, the place is run just sort of as like a, you know, a piggy bank for Donald Trump. There no, there no controls in place, there no procedures, there’s never been like an outside board of any organization of his that I’m aware of that has held him in check or held him accountable or asked him any tough questions ever.

1:12:26 It’s a bunch of people who were close to him and who protect him and who were members of his family who are loyal to him. He does whatever he wants and he turns his failures into success and often turns his successes into failures, and that’s how he conducts himself, and he’s never had any experience in sort of, you know, the rigorous ethical way that public servants are supposed to conduct themselves. So he violates, by the way, ethical rules on a daily basis that would cause anyone else in the government to be fired, tweeting support for a particular, you know, the products like television shows or newspapers from an official presidential account, you can’t do that.

1:13:07 If I had done that, you, this U.S. Attorney, if I said, hey, buy Coca-Cola, I would have got a phone call, my Twitter account would have been suspended by the Department of Justice. So he’s built that way, he likes to do, he likes to do, and he’s figured out that actually I’m the president and a lot of these things nobody can stop me. Let me, that’s a strange conundrum, because legally he can’t be stopped even though it’s unethical, and the public might reelect him.

1:13:32 They might, people should say that again and again, so what sinks in? Could he be prosecuted, or will he be prosecuted after he leaves office? I don’t know. You know, the Mueller report makes very clear that it abides by the conclusion of the Office of Legal Counsel that says a sitting president of the United States cannot be indicted or prosecuted, but it also makes clear that they also believe that a president can be indicted and prosecuted once he leaves office, not the president, former president can be prosecuted, and then it goes on to say in a way that I think is striking that the president also can be investigated while in office, but can’t be indicted or prosecuted, so I can’t state that the president’s committed the crime of obstruction because that would be unfair because he wouldn’t be able to defend himself because there would be no trial at which he could clear his name.

1:14:21 And then the final thing it says, that’s the stark thing, is, therefore we have conducted a, you know, a thorough investigation to preserve the evidence while memories are fresh and while documents are available. That sounds a lot to me like at least Bob Mueller thinks there is the, at least theoretical, possibility of prosecution after he leaves the presidency. But technically he didn’t collude with the Russians. Well, so you’re using this term collude and then you’re qualifying it with technically, so I don’t know quite what that means.

1:14:54 What Bob Mueller made very clear about when he used the term collusion is he wasn’t, he didn’t look at collusion, whatever that means, that’s a, you know, an informal term that journalists and Donald Trump himself have used to sort of, he has used it for purposes of setting a bar, depending what your understanding of the informal meaning of collusion is. A colloquial sense of collusion, as Adam Schiff, who’s the chair of the Intelligence Committee in the House, because lots of evidence that they took advantage of and were welcoming of help from the Russians, and the timing of the email dumps and all sorts of other things for WikiLeaks, is that collusion? I think there’s a good argument that it is, but that’s of a real consequence other than rhetorically.

1:15:35 What Mueller really found was that there was not enough evidence, there was not enough evidence to show that Donald Trump or members of his campaign conspired, as the law defines conspiracy, you know, to interfere with the election in 2016 or engage in hacking which interfere with the election in 2016. Those are very different things. To me, okay, what’s next for you? You’re podcasting, right? I can’t wait.

1:15:59 I have a good gig. I’m getting a big appetite besides dinner. What about you and your life? Oh, you mean after today? Yeah, you’re broadcasting now, you’re, but what’s the next five years like for you?

1:16:08 Um, I don’t know, I don’t, I don’t, I really, I actually don’t think that far ahead. Come on, I got, I got fired in March of 2017. I did not, if you ask me then what’s the next five, I had no idea, you know. I started a podcast called Stay Tuned with Preet. We have a second podcast that, that’s a strange career change, it’s a subscription, but that among the things I do, and I thought would see how it goes, and it’s been a normal asleep, opulent our wildest dreams of how many people with listenings.

1:16:37 I think people want an education about the law, and then one here interesting comfort. It’s like you’re doing, are you talking about things like this, policy issues? Yeah, but also we have interviews with interesting people, like, you know, you, not today for you, but on other days of presumably interview interesting people, and I think long-form discussion, you know, the answering of quite at the beginning of every podcast episode, you know, I take listeners’ questions, I just answer questions they have about the Mueller investigation or about the Supreme Court or about, you know, what’s going on with Washington politics a little bit, not so much politics but policy, and then I do an in-depth interview, you know, with someone of consequence, often who my listeners haven’t heard of but are incredibly thoughtful and smart, during which they might learn something, whether it’s about education or it’s about the Supreme Court or it’s about journalism or it’s about foreign policy.

1:17:33 You know, if I can have a conversation with Fareed Zakaria for an hour right after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as opposed to people getting to see six minutes of that somewhere on cable television, that’s, I think, a real service. So I’m enjoying that, it doesn’t take up all my time, I’m enjoying teaching at law school, I’m enjoying having written this book. I didn’t enjoy writing this book, it’s not supposed to be fun, right? I put all that, but there’s a lot of sweat in that book, little less wet.

1:18:02 Talking about the book, maybe I’ll write another, we’ll see. I also am an obscene legal analyst at on CNN to also help sort of spread the information and college hopefully about the law, and I have these task forces, one on insider trading, we’re gonna make recommendations to the SEC potentially to reform insider trading laws, another task force with, you know, a bunch of Democrats and Republicans who have banded together through the Brennan Center at the NYU School of Law that talks about and makes recommendations to Congress for shoring up democracy, because we think, I think there’s a threat to democracy based on a lot of the things this president is doing. So I have a million things like that, I stay very busy.

1:18:37 Once I am done talking about the book, I’ll see what other projects I’ll take on. I think people really want to have these conversations about law and all of these things you’re talking about, and I think we assume people are too stupid to care, they’re too worried about the cat video and the two-minute soundbite. I think people really want to engage, and one of my best buddies from MIT went to Tulane law school and he used to sit me down and tell me these nuances of the law, like, okay, but if this person does this but the intent wasn’t there, and I’d be like, oh my gosh, that’s it, you really have to think about it, it’s really complicated, and I think people appreciate that.

1:19:12 Look, I wrote the book, by the way, my dad wants everyone to know, even though it has a very serious, hounding legal title, it’s really not about the law, that’s really not just for lawyers. I mean, some lawyers will find some of the things basic in it. It’s about how to think, it’s about how to, you know, exercise discretion, it’s about how to be a leader, it’s about how to make difficult choices. The choices I’m aware of and that I could maybe impart some wisdom on happened to have been law enforcement choices, you know, do you seek 20 years of punishment for someone who kidnapped a baby at 19 days of age from a hospital, or do you allow a lesser sentence for that person?

1:19:48 Do you prosecute somebody who’s an armed New York City police officer who has gone on chat sites on the internet and fantasized about but also taken took steps in connection with kidnapping, torturing, raping, killing and then eating victims? Is that fantasy, is it more than fantasy, is it a thought crime, is not a thought crime? What are the ways you get information from people, do you use harsh interrogation techniques, we talked about this a little bit, or do you find ways to build rapport?

1:20:22 I mean, there are million issues and questions. What makes a good judge, how do you make sure a judge is fair? You know, it may sound like it’s only for people who practice in court, but I make the point that if you’ve ever engaged in competition, if you ever engaged in sport, it’s never been part of any sort of disciplinary, you know, issue at work or at school or in your home, you’ve been a judge or you’ve been judged, and you know how to deal with those circumstances, how to decide what the truth is, whether it’s your kids stole the cookie from the government from the jar or the babysitter, you wonder, it took 20 bucks out of my out of my wallet, or something more serious like did the person commit the homicide or not.

1:21:02 Those are all things that people need to think about and make sure that they’re equipped to handle because they happen in everyday life all the time. Yeah, what about you, how do you get up every day and be the best you can be? Oh God, damn alarm clock goes on, whatever phone. Do you have daily practices? Because you know you have to show up, how 2 percent of every day, you know.

1:21:21 So I don’t, this will surprise, so I’m a person of habit in some ways and otherwise I do not like regularized rituals. So in some, so I’ll be the person who, it’s happened today, I’m staying in a lovely hotel nearby where my publisher has put me up. First I had lunch in the restaurant in the hotel, and I haven’t had a lot of time because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and I ordered something and it was quite delicious, so guess what I’ve ordered every day since.

1:21:49 I don’t think about it, it worked, it was great, it was not too expensive, that has been my lunch three days in a row. So in that way I guess I engage in habit, and that keeps my mind free. But when I was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, even though I was running a, you know, a fairly large organization, 850 employees, 50 million dollar budget, not the biggest thing in the world but not that small, I kept thinking like I should have regularized meetings, I should have, you know, 10 different meetings, one for the staff, one for the, you know, this office, this subdivision, that subdivision, to talk about, you know, management issues and everything else, and at the, cuz I think a lot of leaders do that, right?

1:22:26 They have a lot of meetings that are regularized, every three days we will talk about this case, and you know what, I hated that, I couldn’t do it, which is not to say that we didn’t have meetings, we had a ton of meetings, we had meetings all the time, but they happened sort of ad hoc. If I had something that I really wanted to know, I would I would tell, you know, my deputy or someone else, can you bring the team in, and the team would be brought into the office and we would talk about it, and maybe that was not always the best way to do it, because people are off doing other things, well, I could wait a couple of hours. I felt with some exceptions, I had some regularized maybe, but I think I only had two, two kinds of meetings that I had on a regular basis, one was once a week and one was once a month with the civil division, but other than that, I don’t know how we got in the subject about how, how do I do, how do I do what I do.

1:23:17 Yeah, I saw, um, I’m, I’m a bit ad hoc, I, and I think a lot of better leaders might tell you, more successful people might tell you that’s not the way of going about doing. So when I woke up in the morning I wasn’t necessarily sure what I’d be doing that day. I didn’t write my book in a regularized way. I think, get up every morning, like some authors told me, I’ll get up 7:00 a.m., I get my coffee, I put my phone aside, I write for three hours, I write, you know, four pages, and then I forget about it the rest of the day, maybe edit lightly at night over a glass of wine, and then four months I have a book.

1:23:48 I don’t know how, I don’t know who those people are, that is not, and maybe there’s hope for people like me who have, you know, attention problems. I wrote the book in spastics, you know, fits and spurts, over about thirteen months, and there are weeks I didn’t write a page, and then there were times where I locked myself in a room in various places around the country for four days and emerged with, lino, 35 pages, and that’s how that book got written. So that’s why it’s a long and convoluted, unsatisfactory answer to your question.

1:24:20 I actually don’t, I actually don’t always know what I’m doing when I wake up in the morning. Hmm, what was the best day of your life, the worst day of your life? Oh God, well, the best day of my life, there are three of them, of equal enjoyment and joy and thrill, were obviously the days my children were born. I mean, it’s nothing like that, right? And we were talking about our kids earlier.

1:24:43 Yeah. Professionally, the best day of my life was the day I got, I can’t tell if it’s the day I got accepted or the day I got sworn in as a federal prosecutor, as an Assistant United States Attorney. You know, it’s February 28, 2009. Ever thought then that there would come a time where I would actually be the lead of the office? I thought I’d hit the jackpot by somehow mistakenly being accepted into that office, you know, whose admissions screening was so difficult that it was very, very, very hard to get in.

1:25:11 I remember accepting on the phone to Mary Jo White, left work that day to go celebrate, and there may have been some wine there, were even a lot of wine and other things drunk that day in celebration. But you know, people focus on my career as United States Attorney and I got to oversee this amazing office, and that’s how people got to know me and that’s why maybe some people are buying the book, but I used to say to the people in my office, I would have led a perfectly happy, content life and professionally successful life, I think, had I never become United States Attorney and never any expectation of that, no entitlement to it, and it’s, I think it’s in some ways still absurd that I got to have, you know, the dream job of a lifetime that will never get better when I was 40 years old.

1:25:58 So that’s beyond anything that I could have aspired to, but I would have been upset and would have felt something lacking and kind of not been able to be some sort of federal prosecutor like I got to be in 2000, because I felt that was a calling, I thought that was a mission-oriented job, to work with really fine people who you know believed in the law, who believe in the rule of law, who believed in doing things for other people, not just for themselves. So that was my best day, either the day I got accepted or the day I got sworn in into that job. Hmm, what, family, what scares you?

1:26:30 You scare me a little bit, beside, I mean, you scare me a lot, come on, now that I have to worry about the poison in my water, why mention, and then Bill Browder wouldn’t drink your water because I trust that man, I’ve known him longer than, could’ve janked my water. We scare the out of me. What else? With your matching tie and socks, it’s very intimidating, you neck and a waistcoat, it’s go, you got that. Yeah, look, I look, um, I talked about this in the book, doesn’t scare me because I got over it.

1:26:59 So I have fears a lot, that if you wanna know really, really, really scares me, heights. I am scared of heights, not enclosed heights, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t do that. I don’t mind being on an airplane, I could be 30,000 feet up, I could probably be an astronaut, I wouldn’t be able to moonwalk, but unenclosed heights, my family knows that I don’t join them when they do, what was that called, bungee jumping? Well, that would, that no, no, what do you call it in the line, ziplining?

1:27:26 Oh, it’s a planner, you don’t do that? I didn’t, once. Okay, I almost, um, I almost didn’t survive. Anything else? Merrily, no, but what I talk about in the book is, is I think it’s important for people, even if they’re successful, it’s a little bit healthy to worry about looking, you know, like you don’t know what you’re doing, but then you have to get over that and you have, you know, the imposter complex, right?

1:27:50 I show up at this office full of lots and lots of people who were smarter than I am, the resumes are better than mine, and they all expect you in orbit here, the boss, he must be this much. Now if he’s the boss, he must be the smartest guy, he must be the, you know, the most clever guy, the most brilliant guy, and you think, well, am I gonna expose that I’m not, or I’m gonna, you know, try to be a better leader than that and have enough trust in my own judgment and instincts that I will ask my dumb question. There’s a whole chapter on dumb questions and how that’s important.

1:28:20 You’ve asked none today. Well, man, you said there’s never a dumb question, that’s your, that’s your manager, right? Well, that’s how I harmonize those two things, and you encouraged all of your people to ask a lot of dumb questions, be extra basic questions, but a few dumb questions gets people’s, you know, ear listening more quickly. Yeah, don’t assume thinking and don’t assume. But the other thing is, you know, I keep complimenting the people who worked in the office, I think they’re brilliant folks, but the one, so I didn’t have a concern, a generalized concern, of these, you know, smart young men and women, when we were hiring, that they were unethical.

1:28:50 You know, I was a watch for that, but it’s pretty, confident they were ethical, pretty confident they worked hard, pretty confident were really freaking smart because where they came from and what the recommendations are. I was pretty confident that they cared, you know, and they were dedicated, so what was I concerned about, cuz always something, and you realize that really, really smart people who have always been successful, who have been successful in part because they’ve always been able to find the answer to a question in a book, whether in college or in law school, now they’re showing up and they’re federal prosecutors and, you know, this might come as a surprise to some people, it’s not clear what to do all the time, and the the questions you have to ask yourself are not answerable in a book.

1:29:33 You know, nobody was taught in law school, I say this about other donors, taught in law school, had to talk to a member of a crime family, it’s in a room, what’s the best approach? Nobody was taught in law school anywhere, I don’t think, maybe if you do a clinic, you know, how to get someone who’s worried about testifying as a robbery victim, who may have questionable immigration documents, and persuade them despite their fear to come in and testify. No, you don’t get taught those things, and now all of a sudden you have these brilliant, genius, you know, young men and women, sometimes call them kids, but they’re not kids, but they sometimes look like kids, to seek help and to ask, you know, what do I do, how do I do this, or what’s the procedure for X or Y, because they haven’t been taught it.

1:30:17 And so what I would always say to people in my office and admonish them about was, you know, people think that a case can’t survive suppressed evidence, I said a case can’t survive suppressed questions. If you don’t have the confidence to show your lack of confidence, then all hell will break loose and there’s a lot of trouble there. So, you know, what I’m, you can be afraid of looking dumb, but you really can’t be, you need to overcome that. Yeah, circuit advice.

1:30:46 What would we be surprised to learn about Preet? Something you do that just, we just kind of surprised us? You know, I, I don’t, I’m very kind of boring, I guess, not a lot is a problem, not a lot of surprises. It’s very surprising that there’s nothing surprising about me. Okay, what keeps you awake at night?

1:31:06 Anything, do you worry about our future, the country, any of that kind of thing? Yeah, you know, yeah, I’m worried about that. Look, I am, I talked about it not directly in the book, as I think it impliedly, I talk about the state of the country and the worries I have about the undermining of democratic institutions. Yeah, but I’m worried, I’m worried that Donald Trump will get reelected. I think that’s a problem for the country, I think it’s a problem for the world, by the way.

1:31:29 I don’t say these things because I don’t like Republicans, people always make these things out to be partisan, I’ve had a million people on my show and who I follow who are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and conservatives for a long, long, long time, they don’t, they don’t think Donald Trump is Republican. I don’t know what he is, I don’t think he’s a Republican, and I think there are a lot of Republicans who were kept in line because they’re in office and they’re worried about what will happen if they cross the president. I think especially if Donald Trump loses, you will see, and it’ll be, you know, a parade of cowards.

1:32:04 I think people who are in office who will try to revise history and say all the things that they thought about Donald Trump at the time, and that’ll be senators, it’ll be House members, it’ll be governors who didn’t speak up or were mildly spoke up, like Mitt Romney you see do from time to time, or Senator Ben Sasse do from time to time, but they will all abandon him, and they will not only abandon him as their president, I think they will abandon him as a standard bearer of the Republican Party. There will be people who will be that, you know, the Trumpites, I think, and will say, well, that’s what Trumpism is, Republicanism, but when you have a party that’s defined not by any principle or policy but defined by sort of the ego and the whims of a particular human being who was in his mid-70s, that can’t last.

1:32:52 I always ask a few questions at the end, mom, I guess. Oh, is this me at the end? Yes, you can go have dinner. If I’m very hungry, I know. If I could give you a magic phone and you can ring up the 20-year-old Preet and give that young man, oh my gosh, I guess, sure.

1:33:07 You’re not at Law School yet, are you? You’re at, understand, so 20, I was a junior at Harvard probably. You were Harvard and then you went Columbia. Columbia Law School. Gospel.

1:33:15 Okay, so junior at Harvard, give that young man some advice, what would you tell him? Oh, so so this, this is not your own, just putting me on the spot here. This is advice I would give is probably, at the most important advice, but it’s the thing that first popped into my mind, and probably I was worse at this than other people. So I was very, very shy. I find hard to believe.

1:33:36 Here I am, outgoing Preet Bharara. I was deathly shy until I was in my, I think, my early to mid-20s, and I thought that the way you learn, and the way you, and is very different to my current self, and the way you achieve is to engage with material. You know, I studied in college, as a political theory, it was my focus, was government major, political theory focus, and I didn’t go to class much, don’t tell anyone. I didn’t have no mentors who were professors, I didn’t get to know any of them, and I never went to an office hour.

1:34:13 I didn’t have, you know, a lot of friends, I was not particularly social, and I thought, well, you know, you just, you read Rousseau and you understand it and you take the test and you get your A and that’s fine, then you write your thesis, and I was a pretty good student and I thought that that was learning, and even in law school I didn’t go to class much and I didn’t develop relationships with people who were, you know, potential mentors or long-lasting relationships other than with a few friends, and you realize over time that it’s a lot of what learning is about and a lot of what maturing is about is interaction with other people, and it’s not just the material, you engage with the material in a different way if you, if you do that, and relationships are important, it’s important to success, and it’s important not just to kind of mean networking in the sense that someone might give you a job one day, but people will be in positions to help you and to help you grow and to teach you things.

1:35:04 And I never thought I needed any of that, and part of it was I didn’t think I needed it because in some ways I was an arrogant young kid, I’m like, I’m smart enough, I can learn this on my own, and the other was I was very shy, I mean it seemed awkward to me. You know, it’s funny, I became, you know, I became, as I’m teaching early on in my time as an assistant, and I was teaching law school classes, legal writing, and I had never visited a professor at office hour ever, I never got up to and asked a question after class, any professor, ever, and I almost never raised my hand, which I know seems odd because I make my living by never shutting up now. And I realize that there are people who do this and then like, oh, you you end up becoming, you know, something to people who were younger that hopefully, you know, helps them mature and grow and nurture something in you as well.

1:35:51 So my advice to my, although, look at alternate fine, I got to be us turn 840, but that’s because I discovered this thing that I didn’t realize before, right, that having that, having human engagement, if you care about learning and education and success, it’s good to get to know people and it’s good to let, you know, people are in a position to teach you, let them teach you. Yeah, on that same note, best advice you’ve ever received? So it’s this is the other piece of advice that I give people, don’t know who told me this, probably early on when I was in anyone’s, and this also sounds dumb because, how else, you know, the advice is, be yourself, which sounds dumb, is how the hell else are you gonna be, who you gonna be, you’re not gonna be a clown if you’re not a clown, and, but the reason I think that’s important is authenticity is one of the most important things you can have.

1:36:43 People talk about in politics, but is also important in personal relationships, it’s also important in any business environment, it’s important certainly if you’re an advocate and you’re trying to persuade people in the debate or trying to persuade people at a business meeting or trying to persuade people in a court of law, and you find, even though people know that they should just be themselves, they’re not. Um, you would see people get up in court and they were normally quiet people and if I will, I need to, you know, jazz it up a little bit, and you would look at them, utila, I don’t, I’ve never heard you speak that way, why are you speaking so loud? If you’re soft-spoken, it’s okay, just be soft-spoken in the appropriate way in court.

1:37:21 If you’re kind of loud and garrulous and you move your hands around, don’t try to suppress that, people will see your nose start to bleed if you try to suppress yourself, but it’s not to say if you, you know, you’re a crazy person who drinks a lot of beer and curses a lot that you should do that in front of the jury, but you should be yourself, and you should try to, I see people all the time try to emulate someone else’s success or style of success, and the examples that I keep giving are in the courtroom, but I mean this is sort of all walks of life, they’re incredibly effective public speakers who speak softly and others who speak, you know, with a lot more, you know, vigor and enthusiasm, but as long as you’re communicating the thing that you think is important to communicate and it’s true and it’s consistent, and that’s good.

1:38:11 You know, I’ll give you a funny example of this, which is frivolous, everything I’ve learned to be myself, and it just shows you, you know, the common view that people are not what they seem and are surprised when they see consistency in someone and how they talk. So I have this podcast and some people know me only from the podcast, and I just talk, I think I’m just myself on the podcast, and I was doing a panel at NYU Law School once a few months ago on the nature of executive power and the scope of the executive power, and I’m on the panel, I’m talking with, you know, other people much smarter than I am, and a woman comes up to me afterwards who was apparently a fan of the podcast and she says, Missy, you sound exactly like you do on your podcast.

1:38:52 I’m like, well yeah, because that’s me, and I don’t put on, I don’t try to be something else just because it’s being recorded. It’s a Phyllis example, but I think I think there’s value in people, you know, because it’s not just being yourself, if you know how to be yourself it also evinces a comfort with yourself, and so it’s not just authenticity, it’s also self-possession. And self-possession, Michael Lewis, great author, once said on my show, I asked him his question, it’s a very wrong, if we do this again I can make it much shorter, I said to Michael Lewis, what is the quality of leaders that you found, that of the leaders who most resist corruption, engaging in bad conduct, because we both sort of students of this, and he said, because he has this great book out recently that talks about some of these things and how government, you know, officials help sustain good things in the country, and he said self-possession, being self-possessed, and that’s not too far off from being yourself, right?

1:39:55 If you’re self-possessed, you’re not relying on other people for, you know, acknowledgment necessarily, or other people for yourself worth, your self-worth comes from, you know, being in command of yourself, being possessed of yourself, being comfortable being yourself. So you know what I’m talking about, being yourself, I’m not just talking about just sort of acting the way you normally act when you’re at home in your pajamas, I mean something, you know, I think more significant than that, that allows you to be a better person and that allows you to resist bad things. Mmm, that’s good advice, and this is what you told people, and there’s a change in yourself, yourself, man.

1:40:28 Yeah, because there’s no other person, as someone else said, yourself, because everyone else is taken. Michael wrote Liar’s Poker and all those other books. Yes, right, yeah, great books. Okay, this is superb training manuals a little bit for me, but anyways, last part of that to that 20-year-old that’s watching, listening, advice to them, you know, they live in this through, we just do that one, no, that was best advice you ever received, but what’s advice to the 20-year-old out there that’s watching us?

1:40:53 I mean, they grew up in this world where, you know, kind of strange things are happening. When I was 20 I didn’t see these things happening, people tweeting things, invest, I just didn’t see this happening, it’s kind of a new world but a more educated world. What advice do you give to them? Yeah, so I, this is actually a much more commonplace advice for, you know, the 50-year-old guy to give to the young person, having spent most of my adult life in public

1:41:44 You should pursue those things, I think, I think a lot of people just take the beaten path. This is not earth-shattering advice, but you know, if you overly plan your life, is it related to that, if you overly keep running into these people who are young and ambitious and they had their whole, you know, career plotted out, you asked what I’m going to be doing in five years, these young, ambitious people who want to be President of the United States or they want to be captain of industry and their sort of plan, and I guess that’s, I guess that’s good, and maybe the advice you give is to stray a little bit by the path that you took, accidentally or not, to get where you are, but I saw people constantly, once I became more successful, I became the U.S. Attorney, asking me this question, what advice do you have to give me, I’m 20, and the reason they were asking me is because they wanted to reverse engineer my career somehow.

1:42:39 So, well, you know, you were really smart, you did this thing, then you did that thing, they did this other thing, and then voila, you’re the U.S. Attorney, that’s amazing. And so I didn’t think about it that way, I wasn’t plotting those things out. What I did at every juncture was figure out, you know, what is interesting to me, what is fun to me, where am I going to learn, because a lot of decisions I made along the way made no sense. I didn’t always take the most prestigious position.

1:43:02 I ended up with the most prestigious position that I could possibly imagine within the law, but along the way I did, I did other things. I went to work for a small firm at one point because I wanted to learn much more about how to be, you know, a criminal lawyer and work in, you know, a courtroom, that was not a place that other people would have gone, it was not as well-known, as in pay as well. So I worry about these people who plot out or thinking. I tell the story of my brother, my brother, you know, I love talk talk by the contrast between me and my brother, you know, take the path that’s less traveled.

1:43:34 I know it’s very, you know, almost mundane to give that piece of advice, but when you use the examples of other people then it’s not so mundane. And my brother, I would say we had the same, you know, background, we’re told that we have the same parents, we’ll have never done the DNA test, so it’s a good control sample of two siblings three years apart. We both went to Ivy League undergraduate schools, we both went to Columbia Law School, literally three years apart, we both practiced law for a number of years, then he sort of starts to veer off towards business, and he decided at one point to start an Internet company, didn’t do very well, it sort of failed, I lost money as an investment in that Internet company, then he has a decent job as a general counsel of a small publicly traded company.

1:44:17 He calls me one day once I become the U.S. Attorney, I think, well, I’m now the winner in my family, I’m the U.S. Attorney, I have subpoena power, what’s up, I win the rivalry contest for all time, right? And you would say game over, and he calls one day and he says, you know, it’s well, let you know, I’m starting a new thing with Marc Lore, I mentioned before, Marc Lore, he’s his best friend from high school, and he says I’m gonna do this, you think, I’m gonna sell diapers.

1:44:44 I’m sorry, you’re gonna do what, like door-to-door? What’d he mean instead? I’m gonna sell diapers on the internet. You’re aware this thing called the Internet, bro, right? Like yeah, he’s like, so on the side, like what do you use?

1:44:55 Like, no, no, Marc and I have this business plan and we’re gonna quit our jobs, gonna put all our savings into it, and we’re gonna sell diapers on the internet. And I was like, you knock yourself out, and and they started this company, and I always say, you know, my poor mom and dad were already, you know, not happy that neither of us became a doctor, my dad was a proud Indian immigrant pediatrician in New Jersey for decades, and now they’re young, they’re older son, he’s the man, literally, so being a bona fide U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, very impressive, and their other son went from being an Ivy League-educated, of alive, Ivy League-educated lawyer at a Wall Street firm, went from that to literally selling diapers on the Internet under the slogan, this is true, we’re number one and number two.

1:45:46 That’s all true, I had a t-shirt, we’re number one and number two. Very clever, but not the kind of thing that makes mom and dad from India proud. Okay, and then whenever I tell that story everyone lastly you like, you’re a very good audience, you laughed, imagine thousands of people like you laugh at that story, and I say yeah, my brother laughed too when he sold that company to Amazon for five hundred and forty million dollars. Now you tell me how to reverse engineer that.

1:46:11 You can’t. You do something that you think is interesting and fun, maybe you abandon your law degree, maybe you abandon your visitor, maybe, maybe Brian, maybe you abandon banking and you get to hang out with people like me for like two hours at a time with questionable water. So I presumably you would give similar kind of advice, and people should take it, which is don’t plan these things out. Yeah, just do it, just do what you’re doing, it’s fine, it works out.

1:46:37 Yeah, it’s really good advice. So does that mean he’s above you now? And oh yeah, pecking order, he’s my boss, I’d do my podcast to his company, he’s literally, yeah, I think it was, my parents are around, it makes it harder for him to fire me. Well, maybe got to do the comeback soon, maybe Preet. I appreciate the time.

1:46:57 Absolutely, even though you were a bit of a hostile witness. I don’t think I don’t ever, I don’t even know what that means. It’s just cheat, as I say, as a same UK, I was little cheeky, little cheeky. Yeah, it was good. The book, Doing Justice, it’s excellent, like you said, it’s not about, it’s not really about being an attorney, it’s about being a person, and he walks you through, kind of from a bird’s-eye perspective, what each of these four pieces are when it comes to going after and coming after a case, and it’s very interesting, a lot of great stories in there as well.

1:47:23 Buy, buy many copies. Yes, buy many copies. Podcasts as well, you got two, one behind a paywall, Stay Tuned with Preet. Yeah, and the Cafe Insider. Good stuff, thanks for the time, I appreciate this honesty, and I’m fascinated with the law.

1:47:37 Okay, good, I’m gonna be watching it, watching the politics different, I think sometimes it’s hard to really understand what’s going on and just talking with you makes me understand it a bit more and the nuance and all of those things. Right, this has been a great fun, thank you, sir. Thank you so much.