The Ben Shapiro Show - Preet Bharara | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 74

00:00:00.000 If you're a federal judge and you piss off the president, he tweets at you and you get to keep your job for the rest of your life.

00:00:05.000 If you're a U.S.

00:00:05.000 attorney and you piss off the president, you get a podcast.

00:00:08.000 So it's quite a different way of going about it.

00:00:18.000 Hey, hey, welcome.

00:00:19.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.

00:00:21.000 I'm super excited to welcome to the show former U.S.

00:00:23.000 Attorney for the Southern District of New York, host of Stay Tuned with Preet and the author of his new book, Doing Justice, Preet Bharara.

00:00:29.000 Preet, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:00:30.000 Thanks for having me.

00:00:31.000 I really appreciate the book.

00:00:32.000 You call me dude?

00:00:33.000 I call a lot of people.

00:00:34.000 OK, all right.

00:00:35.000 I am.

00:00:36.000 Well, good.

00:00:37.000 I don't want to misgender you. 0.93

00:00:38.000 All right.

00:00:39.000 All right.

00:00:39.000 Don't start.

00:00:41.000 It's like he's into that stuff.

00:00:43.000 So the book is Doing Justice, A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law, and it really is first rate.

00:00:49.000 For folks who only know you on the right from the big blow up with President Trump, firing you or resigning you from the Southern District of New York, what's been your career path to get to now being a podcast star?

00:01:04.000 So it's not the ordinary career path.

00:01:06.000 But just one thing off the bat, thanks for having me on.

00:01:09.000 Thanks for mentioning the book.

00:01:10.000 I don't know if you appreciate this, because we move in different circles, but my book came out the same day your book did.

00:01:16.000 And I was very excited when the New York Times bestseller, everyone loves the New York Times when it comes to the bestseller list, right?

00:01:21.000 Whether you think it's fake news or not, or failing or not.

00:01:24.000 And I was very excited to tell my family when it first came out and I got first dibs at seeing it, this book debuted at number four on the nonfiction bestseller list.

00:01:34.000 I appreciate you mentioning that.

00:01:35.000 and they saw the list, and they're like, great, but Ben Shapiro beat you, and you debuted at number one.

00:01:40.000 I know you're probably modest and don't want to have me remind people, but it did.

00:01:43.000 And so I just want you to know I've hated you ever since. 0.99

00:01:46.000 Screw you, Ben. 0.99

00:01:47.000 I appreciate you mentioning that, and that does give me a surge of warmth in my heart. 0.85

00:01:52.000 Why don't you tell me about how you got into the podcasting space?

00:01:54.000 So I spent my whole life as a lawyer and wanted to be a lawyer from fairly early on.

00:02:01.000 Stereotypically, my family, Indian American immigrant family, my dad was a doctor, was a pediatrician.

00:02:07.000 He was born in India.

00:02:08.000 I was born in India.

00:02:08.000 I'm an immigrant myself.

00:02:10.000 And the dream for him, like it may be in a lot of immigrant families from that part of the world, not to overly stereotype, but was for his kids to become doctors.

00:02:17.000 It was me and my brother.

00:02:19.000 And I was not so good in chemistry.

00:02:20.000 I was not so good in other sciences.

00:02:22.000 Not bad in biology.

00:02:24.000 But my path was towards the law, because I thought that would be the best way to make a contribution.

00:02:29.000 And then the kind of law I wanted to practice after being in private practice for six years was to be a prosecutor, because I thought it's the best use of whatever skill set I had as a lawyer to do good and to protect the community.

00:02:41.000 And uniquely, I think, among sets of lawyers, I have great respect for lots of different kinds of practices that people engage in, or even when they leave the law.

00:02:50.000 But unlike a lot of lawyers, you don't have to make an argument you don't agree with.

00:02:53.000 You don't have to take a position that you think is not just.

00:02:56.000 Your job every day is to either bring a case, if you think it's appropriate to do so, and if you don't think it is, then you don't do that.

00:03:02.000 I had an interim period of time where I worked on the Senate Judiciary Committee from about 2005 to 2009.

00:03:07.000 Then I became the U.S.

00:03:09.000 Attorney.

00:03:10.000 And then, as you have alluded to, The election went away.

00:03:16.000 A lot of people didn't think it was going to happen.

00:03:18.000 President Trump got elected, and I assumed I was going to be out of a job at some point through a normal transition process.

00:03:25.000 And then I wasn't, because through Senator Schumer, he asked me and then asked to meet with me personally at Trump Tower on the 26th floor, personally asked me to stay on for whatever reason.

00:03:35.000 We can talk about it or not talk about it.

00:03:36.000 Some months later, in March of 2017, Lots of people were asked to resign.

00:03:41.000 I wanted to make sure that I was being fired.

00:03:43.000 I refused to resign for reasons we can also discuss.

00:03:46.000 And then I was gone.

00:03:47.000 And then the question is, you know, you're a lapsed lawyer, too.

00:03:50.000 Do you go do the normal thing that people do, which is go to a big law firm, which pretty much everyone in my position as a U.S.

00:03:56.000 attorney in the Southern District goes and does?

00:03:59.000 Based, I guess, a little bit on the circumstances of my departure, and for some other reasons.

00:04:05.000 People were interested in having me write a book, which is really not about the circumstances of my firing at all.

00:04:09.000 I mean, I think Trump appears less in the book than a lot of other people, most other people.

00:04:16.000 And I thought, you know, I could take this period of time while I'm writing my book.

00:04:18.000 I don't know how long it took you to write yours.

00:04:20.000 For me, it was really hard, and I didn't think I could do too much else while I was doing the book.

00:04:25.000 And I thought, my brother—it's good to have a brother who is also a lapse lawyer—and started this media company, and he had the possibility of being able to support a podcast.

00:04:35.000 And this was around the time that it seemed to be clear that there was a constitutional requirement For people formerly in government to have a podcast.

00:04:44.000 Everyone has a podcast now.

00:04:45.000 Lots of former federal prosecutors have podcasts now.

00:04:47.000 Every time you look at a TV anchor, they also want to have a podcast.

00:04:50.000 And I thought, how hard can it be?

00:04:52.000 As you know, it's a lot harder than it looks.

00:04:55.000 And I thought I could write the book and spend some time doing that and also speaking, you know, around the circuit, around the country about things that I care about, and also talk about issues I care about and have guests, and I found it to be a very rewarding thing.

00:05:06.000 Bassem Youssef, who's this guy who you may know, who had been one of the leading comedians, although he's a doctor, by training in Egypt.

00:05:14.000 Before the regime change.

00:05:16.000 And he was being harassed a lot for being this outspoken person exercising his right to free speech, which was not the same as we have here when he was in Egypt.

00:05:26.000 And at one point he had even more followers than you.

00:05:28.000 I think he had 30 to 35 million viewers a week to his comedy show.

00:05:33.000 And he leaves, and then for a period of time he was doing a podcast with our company.

00:05:37.000 And it occurred to me, to go back to your original question, why are you doing what you're doing?

00:05:42.000 The arc of justice is long, but it bends towards podcasts, I think.

00:05:50.000 It certainly bends towards social media fame.

00:05:52.000 I mean, that's an obvious truth.

00:05:54.000 But let's do some of the Trump stuff first, and then we can get to some of the deeper ideas in the book.

00:05:59.000 Sure.

00:05:59.000 Because that's obviously the headline.

00:06:01.000 So what exactly transpired between the time when President Trump talked to you and asked you to stay on and the time when he asked everybody to resign, you among them?

00:06:12.000 I don't know.

00:06:12.000 It was an extraordinary thing to be asked to meet with the president-elect of the United States, particularly at that time.

00:06:19.000 It was, I think, the call that he made to Senator Schumer came eight days after the election, when presumably other things were going on, and he was still trying to figure out what his cabinet was going to look like.

00:06:31.000 And then he asked me to come meet with him, which I did, at a time when he still hadn't picked his Secretary of State.

00:06:35.000 That was the week when, I think a day or two before, John Kerry had met with him and they had that famous dinner where the president has his normal, I think, well-done steak with A1 sauce or ketchup and a Coke.

00:06:51.000 So it was an extraordinary thing that you've not seen before, because usually these things are handled out of the Justice Department.

00:06:56.000 I never met with President Obama.

00:06:58.000 He never called me once.

00:06:59.000 I never had a solo meeting with him ever during the seven and a half years that I served under him, seven years I served under him.

00:07:05.000 So, you know, it was a compliment, I thought, to the office.

00:07:08.000 I thought it was a compliment to the work that we had been doing and his appreciation of the work that we had been doing.

00:07:12.000 The weird thing that happened that I've talked about on Stay Tuned, my own podcast, is he began calling me from time to time, which is odd.

00:07:19.000 In the middle of the meeting, by the way, I made this very clear, he was very gracious, he was very warm, he was very nice about everything.

00:07:27.000 Said he'd followed the work of the office.

00:07:28.000 It is still a little strange.

00:07:30.000 He's asking to meet with me.

00:07:31.000 And I was prepared, as other people have said they were prepared to do, Jim Comey, whatever you think of him, to walk out of the room.

00:07:38.000 If he said something untoward or he crossed some line, which he did not do.

00:07:41.000 But at some point in the middle of the meeting, and Steve Bannon was there.

00:07:45.000 Remember him?

00:07:47.000 I do.

00:07:48.000 And Jared Kushner was there.

00:07:50.000 So, you know, the four of us, an odd group of four people, in retrospect, if you think about it, you know, talking about the office.

00:07:58.000 And at some point, Donald Trump, the president-elect, pushes a Post-it pad over across the desk and asked me to put my phone number on it, my cell and my office number.

00:08:11.000 So I'm like, the president-elect is asking me for my digits, which is kind of strange.

00:08:16.000 And I'm thinking, someone must have my phone number because someone arranged the meeting through a phone call.

00:08:22.000 So I didn't quite get what that was about.

00:08:24.000 Nobody seemed to think that was odd.

00:08:27.000 And so I— Trump does his thing, man.

00:08:29.000 Well, now it makes a lot more sense.

00:08:31.000 Now we know about the calls that he makes.

00:08:32.000 We know that he will call the park service, and he picks up the phone.

00:08:35.000 That's sort of an M.O.

00:08:35.000 for him.

00:08:36.000 And maybe that's OK, and maybe that's more normal when you're talking about certain agencies of the government.

00:08:41.000 You're talking about a private business.

00:08:42.000 It's a little bit different to be on notice that, well, the president himself, soon to be the president himself, has a direct line and cell phone number of the city of the United States attorney in the Southern District, who has, by the way, not for nothing, Jurisdiction, and we see in hindsight that that, you know, was used over things like the Trump Foundation, the Trump Organization, various properties, all sorts of things, business associates and business interests in New York, right?

00:09:09.000 So I didn't think that much of it until a few weeks later in December.

00:09:13.000 I was visiting Rikers Island.

00:09:14.000 There's a whole chapter in the book about our trying to reform Rikers Island and the disaster that that place is.

00:09:18.000 So I was without my phone.

00:09:20.000 And I come back and I find that the president-elect has called.

00:09:23.000 So I was like, that's kind of odd.

00:09:27.000 And it could be, you know, just polite.

00:09:28.000 It could be something else.

00:09:29.000 And, you know, when you're in my line of work and you're a trained lawyer, you know, your spidey sense, you know, tickles a little bit and you want to make sure that you're not going to get yourself in trouble.

00:09:38.000 And by the way, you want to make sure you're not going to get the other person in trouble.

00:09:42.000 It's the case that when an elected official or a person who's about to take over some office of a political type is making a phone call to someone who's responsible for enforcement of the law, the person who's doing the bad thing or who look like they're doing the bad thing or crossing some line or maybe giving the appearance of impropriety is the politician.

00:10:01.000 It's usually not the—it's not the prosecutor, although it can be.

00:10:04.000 So I talked about it with some people in my office, my top deputy.

00:10:07.000 I notified the head of transition for the Department of Justice for Trump and let them know that this has happened.

00:10:12.000 And we agreed that, for various reasons, including that he wasn't yet the president—the last meeting had gone without incident and he hadn't mentioned anything—that I could call him back.

00:10:23.000 But I made sure I had a pad and a pen in case something weird happened.

00:10:28.000 And he—we shot the breeze.

00:10:29.000 He's like, how's it going?

00:10:30.000 How have you been?

00:10:31.000 And people should be aware, by the way, I had never met Donald Trump before we had that meeting at Trump Tower.

00:10:36.000 I had no relationship with him, never corresponded with him, had never been in the same room with him, as far as I know.

00:10:42.000 So, it's an interesting call.

00:10:43.000 I made a note of it.

00:10:45.000 I thought it was odd.

00:10:45.000 I think, well, he's going to be busy going forward.

00:10:47.000 You know, it's a big job.

00:10:48.000 This is before I knew about executive time.

00:10:52.000 He called again two days before the inauguration.

00:10:56.000 I'm thinking, you must have a lot of other things to do, including writing your inauguration speech.

00:11:03.000 And again, he shot the breeze.

00:11:06.000 He boasted about some things.

00:11:08.000 And I thought, I hope this ends, and I hope he doesn't keep calling me, because it's sort of awkward.

00:11:13.000 I made the notifications at the time as well, and I sort of put to the side the issue of what I would do if he actually called me when he was the President of the United States.

00:11:22.000 And I also thought, well, it's not as much of an egregious violation, potentially, because there's no Attorney General to go through.

00:11:29.000 The ordinary protocol would be For everyone's protection, and for good appearance purposes, is if there's some reason for there to be a communication that's appropriate, and not about a case, and not saying, like, lay off somebody, and not saying go after somebody, which would be inappropriate and potentially criminal, and not saying that was, you would try to route that through proper channels, you know, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, to talk to the local United States Attorney in Manhattan.

00:11:55.000 Fast forward to March 9th of 2017.

00:11:58.000 I was away from my desk.

00:11:59.000 My assistant was gone for the day, and I got a message from the president's personal assistant—now he's the president of the United States—saying, would you please return the call of President Trump?

00:12:09.000 So now I'm thinking this is a little bit different.

00:12:11.000 This is the third phone call.

00:12:12.000 He's now the president.

00:12:14.000 There's no notice of it.

00:12:15.000 We have no business together.

00:12:16.000 The attorney general has not looped in at all.

00:12:19.000 There have been all sorts of reasons to be concerned, you know, from an appearance perspective, of what it would look like if you have somebody who a lot of people thought should be investigated for various things having direct, you know, off-the-record, behind-the-scenes, unprecedented conversations with the United States Attorney with jurisdiction in those places.

00:12:38.000 So I paused.

00:12:40.000 And I know it may seem odd to a lot of people, and I've had these arguments with folks, so it takes a little bit of length of time to explain.

00:12:45.000 You know, ostensibly, he's your boss.

00:12:47.000 You serve at the will of the President of the United States.

00:12:49.000 He's the only reason why you've continued on for another term in your job.

00:12:53.000 He asked you.

00:12:54.000 He calls you.

00:12:54.000 You call him back.

00:12:55.000 It's the height of rudeness and obnoxiousness not to call him back.

00:12:58.000 And I appreciate all this.

00:12:59.000 I wasn't trying to be rude, and I wasn't trying to be disrespectful.

00:13:02.000 But you have to consider a couple of things.

00:13:04.000 You know, I had a worry that I think has been borne out, at least from my perspective—not everyone of your viewers and listeners will agree with this—that he does not tell the truth about interactions he's had with people.

00:13:15.000 And it turns out, you know, I was never in the Situation Room with him.

00:13:17.000 I'm not Omarosa.

00:13:18.000 But it turns out, like, everyone who's had an interaction with Donald Trump, including his closest allies, like his personal lawyer and staff members, take some precaution and want to make sure that they create their own record of an interaction with the president.

00:13:29.000 So I had that concern going on.

00:13:31.000 I had the concern going on, even if it's an innocuous conversation, for five or ten minutes, and it later came out that the sitting president was talking to the local United States attorney with jurisdiction over various things.

00:13:42.000 At the same time, the people were filing their emoluments clause, civil suit, and calling for investigation of other things, whether they had merit or not.

00:13:50.000 If it later came out that Preet Bharara and Donald Trump were having these side conversations that are really not usual or typical at all, And there was no documentation of what the conversations were about.

00:14:02.000 How's that going to look?

00:14:02.000 Not just for me.

00:14:03.000 How's it going to look for the president?

00:14:04.000 It's not going to look very good.

00:14:05.000 So we consulted with Protocols and thought, well, in the absence of knowing what it's about, probably we shouldn't—I shouldn't speak to him.

00:14:13.000 And what also is lost on a lot of folks who just say, you know, you're a fired, disgruntled guy and you're obnoxious and rude not to return the call to the president, I called Jeff Sessions' office.

00:14:22.000 Before I made a final decision, and he wasn't there, and I talked to his chief of staff, Jody Hunt, and I had a frank conversation with Jody Hunt.

00:14:30.000 It was very clear to me that no one else at the Justice Department, no one in the Justice Department knew that the president was calling me or why he was calling me.

00:14:37.000 And that's also weird, and should, for a normal person, raise red flags.

00:14:41.000 And he agreed with me that, not knowing what's going on—again, again, for the protection of the president and the White House.

00:14:48.000 Probably best to say, unless you know what it's about, unless it can be, you know, arranged through proper channels, and when Jeff Sessions is back in town, it's a wise thing not to talk directly to the president.

00:14:58.000 And the other thing that's hanging over all of this, which people maybe forget, When they say, well, the president doesn't know protocols and he's just being the kind of guy he is, he does.

00:15:06.000 And you know how you know he knows about protocols and why it's damaging and potentially disastrous for politicians and law enforcement people to talk offline when there's a pending case?

00:15:18.000 Because he campaigned on that issue again and again and again, at rally after rally after rally, ringing in my ears, when he kept making the point that Loretta Lynch Sitting on an airplane on the tarmac at an airport, got a surprise visit from then former President Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary Clinton, was under investigation by the same Justice Department that Loretta Lynch was leading.

00:15:40.000 And you know what?

00:15:41.000 It's—you know, the earth exploded, rhetorically and otherwise, when they had their meeting, and Donald Trump said—and a lot of people agree with this.

00:15:50.000 You know, it's not a completely unfair point.

00:15:52.000 I think he overstated it a lot.

00:15:54.000 And I believe in the integrity of Loretta Lynch.

00:15:55.000 And I believe they would not have had an untoward conversation about the investigation.

00:15:59.000 Donald Trump went to rally after rally after rally saying about a private offline conversation between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton.

00:16:06.000 Obviously, that must have been a thing about Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:16:09.000 Obviously, that's a corrupt conversation, although no record exists of that conversation.

00:16:13.000 And I'm thinking to myself, now the president is calling me—not quite the same situation, but it's pretty parallel.

00:16:19.000 And I thought, you know what?

00:16:20.000 For everyone's sake, don't return the call, even though I knew, at a minimum, that it was going to piss him off, because he'd think it highly rude.

00:16:28.000 And then 22 hours later, The phone call came in from the acting deputy attorney general asking me to resign and saying that he had been asked to call all of the holdover Obama U.S.

00:16:40.000 attorneys and asking them to resign.

00:16:43.000 So I said something that maybe seems I've gone on some length.

00:16:45.000 You can interpose a question any time you want.

00:16:47.000 I said, not trying to sound You know, obnoxious, but I'm like, are you sure that applies to me?

00:16:53.000 Because I had that whole thing at Trump Tower and he took my hand and he said, can you stay another term?

00:16:59.000 And to my understanding, nothing has changed.

00:17:01.000 No circumstances have changed.

00:17:02.000 Maybe the call was about that.

00:17:03.000 I have no idea.

00:17:05.000 So until I knew specifically, because I do think whatever you think left or right, there's a decent amount of incompetence at the White House in rolling out new measures.

00:17:13.000 Whatever you think of the Muslim ban, the travel ban from that eighth day in the presidency, they had not thought it out. 0.98

00:17:19.000 Someone woke up and goes to a meeting and says, we're going to announce a travel ban.

00:17:23.000 And nobody had thought about certain things like, well, what if you have a green card and you're on your way back to the country?

00:17:29.000 What do you do with those people?

00:17:30.000 And they had to keep amending those plans.

00:17:32.000 And so I also didn't want to resign a job that I loved dearly and I thought was going OK by accident, because that's kind of embarrassing.

00:17:38.000 Hey, kids, guess what?

00:17:39.000 I resigned.

00:17:40.000 I didn't need to.

00:17:42.000 And that would be that.

00:17:43.000 So I just wanted clarity.

00:17:45.000 That the person who asked me to stay, Donald Trump, personally, face-to-face, which ordinarily wouldn't happen.

00:17:50.000 In the absence of that, I would have been on my way.

00:17:52.000 But I wanted clarity that the person—given, you know, having been around the block, and I wanted just the record to be clear—the person who asked me to stay invited me into his office and looked me in the eye and said, you know, implored me to stay, that he wanted me gone, and if he wanted me gone, I'll go.

00:18:06.000 It took 24 hours, you know, to get that clear statement, and then I went.

00:18:11.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about whether you believe that President Trump's behavior here is an exhibition of corruptness, or is it just an exhibition of he doesn't know what he's doing?

00:18:20.000 You referred to that briefly.

00:18:22.000 I want to get a little more clarity on that in just one second.

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00:19:22.000 Sign up today at So, one of the things that I've experienced, just as a person who's watching both the Obama administration and the Trump administration from the outside, is a feeling that these are obviously administrations that operate incredibly differently.

00:19:44.000 People will say things to me like, well, you know, if Obama had said X and Trump says this, then you would have been up in arms.

00:19:51.000 And sometimes I think that's true because, you know, Barack Obama was a much more serious human being than Donald Trump.

00:19:58.000 Meaning that Barack Obama was a person who actually considered through the things that he said.

00:20:01.000 And then when he said them, he usually meant them.

00:20:03.000 Whereas Donald Trump is a person who has impulses and then he just speaks the impulse.

00:20:07.000 And then the impulse sometimes doesn't mean anything at all.

00:20:10.000 And sometimes it's just him sounding off.

00:20:11.000 And so coming from the legal world, you know, not nearly to the same extent that you are, but obviously, but I am a lawyer.

00:20:19.000 I understand that the focus on protocol.

00:20:21.000 I understand everything that you're saying about the weirdness of a person breaking protocol and that looking suspicious and creating the appearance of suspicion.

00:20:30.000 Do you think that actually this is attributable Trump's behavior here?

00:20:33.000 Was attributable to actual corruption or do you think that it or attempted corruption or do you think that it's attributable to the fact that He literally does not know what he was doing, especially at the beginning of his job, but even now he violates protocol on a regular basis.

00:20:47.000 I think it's actually a complicated question because those things are not necessarily mutually exclusive, right?

00:20:53.000 In lots of cases, whether you're talking about political corruption or you're talking about bank robbery or anything else, there can be a combination of actions that people take That are, you know, with intended purpose, corrupt purpose, and also a lot of incompetence that goes on, and so you can read things into people's behavior that are maybe, you know, unfair to read into their behavior.

00:21:11.000 If you're asking with respect to me, I've never made any accusation or allegation at all that anything with respect to my dismissal was untoward or corrupt or to, you know, stop any investigation or anything else.

00:21:24.000 I don't know.

00:21:25.000 What I do believe to be true, as I said in relating the story about Loretta Lynch, is that You know, I think we give Donald Trump not enough credit when we say, well, he's new, he doesn't know what he's doing, because he knew to attack Loretta Lynch for doing precisely what he was essentially asking me to do, which is to have separate conversations with him.

00:21:43.000 The second thing we know is, in hindsight, if you credit it, which I do, is that on more than one occasion he met alone with Jim Comey.

00:21:51.000 And one of the times that he met with Jim Comey, then the FBI director, what did he do first?

00:21:55.000 He kicked everyone else out of the room.

00:21:57.000 And he said, again, if you believe it or not, I leave it to other people to decide that.

00:21:59.000 But the allegation is, he takes everyone out of the room.

00:22:02.000 Why do you do that?

00:22:03.000 Because, you know, common sense tells you because you don't want them to hear the thing you're saying, because maybe you have some consciousness that it's a bad thing to do.

00:22:10.000 And says, can you lay off Michael Flynn?

00:22:12.000 Or can you offer me your personal loyalty?

00:22:15.000 To that extent, I think when we ask the question, does he know what he's doing, I think in some regard he does.

00:22:19.000 The other thing I'll say about his interactions with me, and I don't want to make this about me, and the book has nothing to do with that stuff, because there are bigger issues in the world, and I bear no ill will to anyone based on my departure.

00:22:30.000 I've had a great life.

00:22:31.000 I did that job longer than I had any reasonable expectation to do it.

00:22:34.000 Dream job of a lifetime, seven and a half years.

00:22:37.000 But he operates in a certain way in business, transactionally.

00:22:42.000 And based on what I've seen and how he deals with other folks, I don't know that he was going to say anything untoward in that call.

00:22:49.000 What I believe in, and it's my reasonable speculation, that had I indulged it, right, and taken the call and said, hey, what's going on, and developed a personal, separate, odd secret relationship, so to speak, because we're not going to be doing a press conference on the fact.

00:23:03.000 We're going to do a readout of my call with the president of the United States, like leaders of countries do.

00:23:07.000 But if I continue that, and based on what I've seen for two and a half years since that time, what's the likelihood?

00:23:15.000 You tell me.

00:23:15.000 What is the likelihood that six months later, seven months later, when someone's looking at Michael Cohen, and he's not going to call because he's like, I'm a team player.

00:23:25.000 He cultivates people.

00:23:26.000 He was trying to cultivate Jim Comey.

00:23:28.000 I think he was trying to cultivate me.

00:23:30.000 And maybe the call would never have come.

00:23:32.000 But you never know.

00:23:33.000 And months later, when I'm looking at something or he has someone that he's unhappy with, Would he think to make sort of an odd remark and say, you know, what's going on with that case?

00:23:44.000 And by that time, by the way, what does it look like?

00:23:46.000 You know, you've taken four calls from the president.

00:23:48.000 You've been chummy with him.

00:23:49.000 Maybe you met with him in the Oval Office.

00:23:51.000 Maybe you had dinner, if you're the U.S. 0.64

00:23:53.000 Attorney or the FBI director or whatever.

00:23:54.000 And now you say, Mr. President, now you've gone too far and you sound the alarm bells and you go to the inspector general or whatever and take whatever precaution you need to take, you don't have a lot of credibility then.

00:24:06.000 It's really important to have distance and independence, I think, in these matters so people have some faith and confidence.

00:24:12.000 So, yeah, on the one hand, I think he blunders forward.

00:24:15.000 On the other hand, I think he's more cunning and conniving than people think.

00:24:18.000 And whether or not that's true, you still have to protect yourself and your own credibility in your job.

00:24:22.000 For me, I mean, look.

00:24:24.000 The Mueller report, we can talk about that also.

00:24:25.000 There's lots of things people like and don't like in it.

00:24:27.000 But the one thing that you see in the Mueller report over and over again, just continuing this theme of conversations, Donald Trump's own hand-picked lawyers and staff, you see in the report, tell him over and over again, Please don't call Jeff Sessions about that.

00:24:44.000 Please don't have this meeting with Jim Cohn.

00:24:46.000 Just don't do it.

00:24:47.000 So it's not like Preet Bharara, appointed by Barack Obama, who is now a critic of the president, saying, oh, it's a terrible thing he made those phone calls.

00:24:54.000 His own people.

00:24:55.000 We're telling him over and over and over again, there's some things you shouldn't do.

00:24:59.000 So this raises a slightly different question, but I think more, but institutionally related.

00:25:04.000 And that is, what should the relationship be like between the president and the DOJ generally?

00:25:08.000 So there's been a lot of criticism of, for example, Bill Barr and his relationship with the president, particularly aftermath of the Mueller report.

00:25:14.000 But people on the right, I think correctly, point out that Eric Holder declared himself Barack Obama's wingman as the attorney general.

00:25:20.000 Well, it's a bad thing to say.

00:25:21.000 He shouldn't have said that.

00:25:22.000 And there was this feeling that, I mean, obviously the president does get to appoint the attorney general, that under unitary executive theory, all these people work for the president.

00:25:30.000 So how independent should the DOJ really be from the president of the United States, given the fact that that effectively means they're not answerable to anyone?

00:25:38.000 I mean, if they're independent of the president and they're independent of the legislature, how does that work?

00:25:42.000 So I think it's both complicated and also very simple, right?

00:25:46.000 And I think people conflate two things.

00:25:48.000 You have all these agencies in the government, and they're supposed to put forward the policy and the priorities of the president.

00:25:53.000 That is the president's right, and he chooses the heads of those agencies with advice and consent.

00:25:58.000 You know, the Senate has to approve, so it's not— Right.

00:26:00.000 You know, you can't do end runs like he's trying to do with vacancies.

00:26:03.000 The Senate has to be involved.

00:26:04.000 So he doesn't get his full, unadulterated choice for every position in government, but he gets a lot of deference, and every president has.

00:26:11.000 The problem is that the Justice Department doesn't have just a policy function.

00:26:15.000 It has uniquely pretty much an enforcement function, right?

00:26:17.000 So perfectly appropriate for the president of the United States, no matter who the attorney general is or who the FBI director is, to have regular contact about keeping the country safe, about talking about if there's an epidemic of gun violence.

00:26:30.000 Hey, Mr. Attorney General, what's going on with this?

00:26:34.000 Are we expending enough resources?

00:26:35.000 Should we go to Capitol Hill and ask for more money?

00:26:38.000 Should we be adopting different legislation?

00:26:40.000 There's a lot of back and forth between subdivisions of the Department of Justice and the White House to talk about what laws they can both get together and support to make sure that we're being protected against outside threats, you know, national security, protecting the homeland.

00:26:53.000 You know, there's an important reason why the president gets briefed every day.

00:26:57.000 And the FBI and the Department of Justice are a part of that.

00:27:00.000 All of that is good.

00:27:01.000 All of that is appropriate.

00:27:02.000 You wouldn't want that to go away.

00:27:03.000 I think that would be a disaster for public safety, for the country.

00:27:07.000 On the other hand, What you cannot have, and what you should not have, is not just from a president, no senator, no governor, no mayor, no president should ever be able to pick up the phone and, with the weight of that office, direct, you know, I'm gonna make you a U.S.

00:27:23.000 attorney for a moment, U.S.

00:27:24.000 attorney Ben Shapiro, hey, I want you to prosecute that guy named X, because I don't like him.

00:27:29.000 I mean, I'll just make a more extreme example.

00:27:31.000 Everyone, I think, understands that if the president calls up and says, go prosecute that person, which, you know, you see echoes of that, That's bad, or to be inquiring as to the timing of cases because it might help them for political reasons, or to say to lay off somebody.

00:27:46.000 Listen, can you see your way clear, like you did with Michael Flynn, which whether or not that's an indictable offense of obstruction, I don't know anybody who thinks that's okay, that's a good thing to do, and certainly puts him in a bad light.

00:27:59.000 So there's a separation between sort of policy and resources and overall, you know, rowing in the same direction.

00:28:05.000 If a president decides that He thinks that his Department of Justice should be, I think, more aggressive on opioid enforcement.

00:28:15.000 Great.

00:28:16.000 If the President of the United States says, hey, you know what?

00:28:18.000 There's an actor in Hollywood that I don't like very much.

00:28:21.000 Think about whether or not you can do a raid on that person's house.

00:28:24.000 He's driving me crazy.

00:28:26.000 Can you go raid Alec Baldwin's house?

00:28:29.000 We want to increase drug enforcement.

00:28:30.000 That guy looks like he's on drugs when he's on SNL.

00:28:33.000 I'm making all this up.

00:28:34.000 Please, no letters.

00:28:36.000 Go rate is home.

00:28:37.000 Everyone understands that the first thing is okay, increasing enforcement priorities, and the second thing is absolutely not.

00:28:43.000 And, you know, there's some gray, I guess, in the middle of those two things, but not that much.

00:28:48.000 And that's where the violations take place.

00:28:49.000 So that raises a slightly separate question, which is, as a prosecutor, how do you decide which crimes to prosecute?

00:28:56.000 And this goes more to the theme of your book, because, you know, obviously, What comes to mind in the sort of Trumpian context is there were statements that were made upon the election of New York's Attorney General Letitia James, where she was stating that her first priority was to go after the Trump Organization, or it was a high priority to investigate the Trump Organization.

00:29:14.000 And I thought to myself, well, shouldn't you actually just be uncovering the crime and then figure out exactly who it is that you're targeting?

00:29:21.000 How do you make the decision, what is a case worth targeting?

00:29:24.000 And are you targeting the case, or are you targeting somebody who you suspect of criminality?

00:29:29.000 So, it depends on the circumstance, but generally speaking, and in the vast majority of cases, prosecutors are supposed to be investigators that they work with, are supposed to be looking at crimes.

00:29:39.000 So, some guy is dead on the street, there appears to be a bullet hole, you investigate, because a crime, it seems, has been committed.

00:29:46.000 Who has committed the crime?

00:29:47.000 I mean, it was on 5th Avenue, it was President Trump, and no one comes in.

00:29:49.000 Yeah, and it's totally fine, and he gets away with it, right.

00:29:52.000 Thanks for reminding us about that, Ben.

00:29:54.000 Or, again, a more complicated situation, which we encounter all the time, Out of the blue, the CEO of a company, a financial institution, resigns.

00:30:03.000 And there's suddenly a restatement of earnings.

00:30:07.000 Tremendously huge change from before.

00:30:10.000 That raises red flags?

00:30:11.000 Probably.

00:30:12.000 You know, folks in my office would jump on it immediately and start issuing subpoenas or making some phone calls to see if a crime has been committed, and if so, what crime and who is responsible for those things.

00:30:21.000 That's all well and good.

00:30:24.000 And so when people say you should be targeting the crime, not a person.

00:30:29.000 That is generally correct.

00:30:30.000 But there's another, there's an area where that's actually not fully true that people, I think, respect and appreciate and would support.

00:30:38.000 And that is with organized crime.

00:30:41.000 You know, we had a much bigger organized crime problem in America than we've had recently, although they're still out there.

00:30:46.000 We were still doing mob cases, including traditional La Cosa Nostra Italian mafia cases.

00:30:51.000 Once upon a time, in New York at least, there was a separate squad for each of the five traditional Italian mob families.

00:30:57.000 We don't have five anymore, but there are still agents who work every day on trying to combat the crimes they're committing.

00:31:03.000 Now, in that circumstance, because there has been evidence over time gathered by law enforcement that particular people, identified people who were members and associates and took an oath of a murder and everything else, within families, there's a targeting of them.

00:31:18.000 And, In fact, I didn't explore this so much in the book because I ran out of space.

00:31:22.000 But that presents actually an interesting question as to the principle, right?

00:31:25.000 Do you look at a crime and see who committed it?

00:31:27.000 Or is it appropriate in certain circumstances, like with the mob, if you're going to make any effort that's going to be successful, to get rid of them and to stop their bad conduct and their harassment of people and their terrorizing of people in their communities?

00:31:41.000 Sometimes, so long as you have evidence that there's reason to believe that it is in fact a racketeering enterprise.

00:31:47.000 Then, like, you know, like they did during Prohibition, you look at the person, and then you start, you know, following them, and you do surveillance of them, and you find out who their associates are.

00:31:58.000 And you have people, one of whom I describe in the book, Kenny McCabe, one of the best mob investigators, detectives of all time.

00:32:05.000 First arrest, I think, of John Gotti was done by Kenny McCabe.

00:32:08.000 He's the guy that you sometimes see in movies who would go to the funerals and he would go to the weddings and the christenings and take pictures of people to show the association.

00:32:17.000 So just to be fully frank, there are those limited circumstances in which, based on good faith understanding of criminal activity in a criminal enterprise, you do target the person.

00:32:28.000 Like John Gotti was targeted by law enforcement based on his identity and belief that he was involved in things.

00:32:35.000 Not just, you know, somebody that John Gotti didn't like winds up dead.

00:32:39.000 Did John Gotti do it?

00:32:40.000 It's both of those things.

00:32:41.000 So I think a lot of critics on the right who look at, for example, the Mueller report and the Mueller investigation, what they would say is that this was—Annie McCarthy has suggested this.

00:32:52.000 Annie McCarthy, by the way, was my—I don't know if you know this.

00:32:54.000 who I disagree with on a lot of things in our old age, he was one of my first supervisors at SDNL.

00:32:59.000 Yeah, I think you told me that at one point.

00:33:01.000 And he said he's made the case that the Trump-Russia investigation was initiated in bad faith, that it was basically initiated in an attempt to dig up material on Trump's team, and that it was out of control.

00:33:15.000 Now, he and I actually disagree on some of this.

00:33:16.000 Now, he and I actually disagree on some of this.

00:33:18.000 I've suggested that I think that it was probably initiated in good faith and that even if there is evidence that the FISA warrants were later exaggerated for purposes of going after Carter Page, for example, or if I feel that the obstruction investigation that was an outgrowth of the Trump-Russia investigation became the center of the investigation as opposed to the original counterintelligence, or if I feel that the obstruction investigation that was an outgrowth of the Trump-Russia

00:33:38.000 But the overall right-wing critique is that this was an attempt to go after Trump on a personal level, not an attempt to go after a particular crime and that the obstruction and the focus on obstruction is in effect a secondary crime.

00:33:52.000 It was Trump if it was a crime at all.

00:33:55.000 It was an attempt by Trump to kick back against the lack of presence of an original nexus of crime.

00:34:01.000 Meaning that the first half of the Mueller report is all about Trump-Russia.

00:34:04.000 There's no real allegation in that half of the report that criminal activity took place.

00:34:08.000 There's a lot of ugly activity and stuff you wouldn't like.

00:34:13.000 Just more precisely, there was a conclusion, there was insufficient evidence to say that the crime had been established.

00:34:20.000 Right.

00:34:21.000 Which is not really a prosecutorial standard, right?

00:34:23.000 I mean, it is in the sense that it doesn't exonerate Trump, but the question wasn't No, but it sort of does.

00:34:29.000 Prosecutors don't exonerate people, right?

00:34:31.000 No, but by implication, he actually sort of is exonerated in the criminal law sense of the crimes that are being investigated in volume one.

00:34:41.000 And we know that by implication.

00:34:42.000 Because in volume two, he says, we're not exonerating you.

00:34:42.000 Why?

00:34:45.000 So if you didn't say it in principle of construction from law school, If you can say exonerated in two and you didn't say the same thing in one, essentially criminally exonerated, which does not mean it's excused or it's wonderful behavior and people should be proud of it.

00:34:58.000 With respect to your question about the origins, I mean, I tend to agree with you.

00:35:02.000 I think it was done in good faith because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that the people who I think you don't have any great reason to suspect their motives would be going after the president for the sole reason of going after the president.

00:35:14.000 And we have, I think, an Inspector General report And others that are looking at the origins of the investigation.

00:35:20.000 So I want to prejudge that, and we can talk about that again when that comes out.

00:35:24.000 Yeah, so I don't know that that holds a lot of water.

00:35:29.000 What do you make of the final outcome of the Mueller report?

00:35:32.000 But I will say, just further to your point, Bob Mueller himself, I don't think anybody has any basis to say that he was in it to sort of somehow destroy or demolish Trump.

00:35:44.000 And I say that for a few reasons.

00:35:45.000 One, it's not the character of the person that I've known pretty well for a long time.

00:35:49.000 Number two, I think in a lot of ways he bent over backward.

00:35:51.000 I mean, look, a different special counsel, not a lot of people are upset who are Trump supporters with Bob Mueller, but a different special counsel.

00:35:58.000 A Ken Starr, for example, would have written a completely different, I think, I'm not saying him in particular, but a Ken Starr-like person, or even Jim Comey for that matter, and any one of a number of other people who, if they wanted to, could have massively hurt Donald Trump in a way that a lot of Trump opponents wished could have massively hurt Donald Trump in a way that a lot of Trump opponents And he didn't do that.

00:36:21.000 Right?

00:36:21.000 So it's an odd argument for people to say that the leader of this special counsel's office was really out to get Trump and all these angry Democrats, and yet at the end of the day, He didn't harm him in the way that people wanted, because I think he held back.

00:36:36.000 He held his fire.

00:36:37.000 People would ask me the question, and I would try to correct them, because I think you're right to worry about this issue, because too many people in the country, whether they don't like Hillary Clinton or they don't like Donald Trump, they will chant, lock him up and lock her up, because they want their prosecutors in these high-stakes cases To be substituted for, you know, a political result, right?

00:36:57.000 They're relying—you know, what couldn't happen at the ballot box— It's a deus ex machina.

00:37:01.000 They're looking for something different.

00:37:02.000 Look, people—all the time, I say, you know, that's not what Mueller is in it for.

00:37:05.000 People would ask me the question, do you think Mueller is going to get Trump?

00:37:09.000 I said, I don't know what that means, but that's not his job.

00:37:12.000 And if he's thinking about it in terms of getting Trump, then he shouldn't be in it.

00:37:16.000 His job, going to what you're saying first, was to see what the truth is, see what the facts are.

00:37:21.000 There was evidence, and I think nobody disputes this, and it's now been basically confirmed by everybody, although Trump seems not to like the conclusion, there was Russian interference in the election.

00:37:30.000 That's like the dead body with the bullet in it.

00:37:32.000 Who did something about it?

00:37:33.000 Was it an accident?

00:37:35.000 Was it self-inflicted?

00:37:36.000 Let's find out what the facts are.

00:37:37.000 That's how I think about, in some ways, the origin of the investigation.

00:37:40.000 There was this interference.

00:37:43.000 It was really bad.

00:37:44.000 Who's responsible for it?

00:37:45.000 In Russia?

00:37:46.000 Which country did it?

00:37:46.000 And if it's Russia, which people in Russia did it?

00:37:50.000 You know, God forbid, were there any Americans involved? 1.00

00:37:52.000 And among all the Americans in the country, the subset of people who were working on the Trump campaign, did they have anything to do with it?

00:37:58.000 And we'll see.

00:38:00.000 People would ask me, when do you think Mueller's going to be done?

00:38:02.000 Do you think he has a timetable?

00:38:04.000 And I would say, this is early on.

00:38:05.000 I would say, I have no idea.

00:38:08.000 And B, I hope he has no idea.

00:38:09.000 Because if he does, then he's prejudging something.

00:38:11.000 And people would ask me, you know, I did a lot of high-profile investigations, some of which I talk about in the book, nothing on the scale Of investigating, you know, a presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

00:38:23.000 But, you know, I investigated—my office investigated the mayor of the city of New York, Democrat, the governor of the state of New York, Democrat, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, Democrat, and the Senate Majority Leader in New York, Republican, right?

00:38:34.000 We went after everybody—prosecuted more Democrats than Republicans over my tenure.

00:38:38.000 Two of them got indicted and went to prison, and two of them didn't.

00:38:42.000 And in all those circumstances, you just—the job is not to go after somebody.

00:38:48.000 The job is to see what the evidence shows and then follow the facts where they may lead.

00:38:52.000 And that's it.

00:38:53.000 And people would ask me all the time, when are you going to be done?

00:38:55.000 When are you going to be done?

00:38:57.000 And they would predict that there was going to be an indictment or not.

00:38:59.000 And you don't know.

00:39:00.000 And as I recite in the book, I have many sections on just the whole sort of exciting business of investigating something.

00:39:06.000 And there are times in investigations, including one we did of the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, where early in the investigation, my team would come across some great evidence.

00:39:14.000 They would come and they would talk about this evidence, and it would sort of make us think that the likelihood of charging this longtime, you know, essentially—ultimately, we were able to prove—corrupt party boss, Democratic Party boss in New York, The likelihood of charging him was growing.

00:39:31.000 And then you would realize, you know what?

00:39:32.000 I think we overstated the value of that evidence.

00:39:34.000 Because we talked to some other people, and this is the process of coming to any conclusion about anything at all.

00:39:39.000 And I presume that the Mueller team did something like this.

00:39:41.000 And then later, some other evidence doesn't seem that important.

00:39:44.000 And then it grows in value because you finally find a witness to corroborate what that person is saying.

00:39:48.000 And ultimately, you sometimes build a case, you sometimes don't.

00:39:51.000 But you never prejudge.

00:39:52.000 And I don't have a basis for thinking, notwithstanding some evidence of the contrary, The bulk of evidence, I think, suggests that it began in good faith and it continued in good faith.

00:40:03.000 And what do you make of the second half of the report?

00:40:04.000 Because that's where, obviously, all of the fire has been focused, is on the obstruction half of the report.

00:40:09.000 And I will say that I do agree with the critique that it's very bizarre to release a full 200-page report about all the things that somebody does wrong.

00:40:20.000 Explicitly acknowledging from the very beginning that you have no capacity to recommend indictment or not.

00:40:26.000 It's almost a parallel situation when James Comey came out and proceeded to read Hillary Clinton the riot act and then explain why he wasn't prosecuted.

00:40:33.000 Well, he got fired for that.

00:40:34.000 Remember, that's the reason Jim Comey got fired because he didn't treat Hillary Clinton well.

00:40:37.000 Right, purportedly.

00:40:38.000 Yes, of course.

00:40:39.000 Yes, of course.

00:40:40.000 Because Donald Trump was deeply affected.

00:40:41.000 It's very confusing.

00:40:42.000 My head starts spinning sometimes.

00:40:43.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:43.000 But there were some of us who were critical of Comey at the time for saying, like, you don't get to spell out all the reasons why you think somebody did all this bad stuff and then say, and we're not prosecuting, because you're not prosecuting.

00:40:55.000 The prosecutor's job is to either prosecute or not prosecute.

00:40:57.000 So that I talk about at some length in the book, this principle.

00:41:01.000 That you have a binary choice as a prosecutor.

00:41:02.000 As an ordinary prosecutor, you have a binary choice.

00:41:04.000 You charge, you don't charge.

00:41:06.000 And you can judge the actions of the prosecutor and the law enforcement investigative agency, NYPD, FBI, DEA, whatever, when they bring a case.

00:41:15.000 And then the Ben Shapiros of the world and the Preet Bharara of the world can, in their leisurely way, pick at it. 0.97

00:41:21.000 Because there's a public document, there's a public proceeding, there is a judge, there is an adversary.

00:41:27.000 You know, under the Constitution, you're required to provide counsel if the defendant can't afford it.

00:41:32.000 And everyone can make their arguments, whether they're lawyers or not, and they can go on television, they can write columns, and they can say.

00:41:37.000 And then you can also make a judgment if the jury rejects the prosecution's case and acquits the defendant.

00:41:43.000 More basis for saying it was an overreach.

00:41:45.000 And everyone can have, I think, a pretty thoughtful, intelligent discussion about whether that case was fairly broad or not.

00:41:55.000 The problem is, sometimes you don't bring the case.

00:41:58.000 And in circumstances where you don't bring the case, but everyone knew you were looking at the case, like happened with some high-profile people in my state that we were looking at, Then there are a lot of questions, because you can't judge it in the same way.

00:42:10.000 And because the prosecutor's hands are tied and their lips should be sealed, right, you haven't seen the grand jury material.

00:42:17.000 So there's a person—you know, money has been paid or a hotel has been built, and people think, well, how did that person get favored treatment if it's a public corruption case?

00:42:27.000 In other cases that are very fraught these days, there's a cop.

00:42:31.000 He shoots an unarmed—turns out to be an unarmed young African-American kid.

00:42:36.000 And how could that happen?

00:42:38.000 A crime must have been committed.

00:42:39.000 Why did you not charge?

00:42:41.000 And then what creeps into the minds of ordinary, good-faith citizens is, was there something at play here?

00:42:47.000 Was it politics?

00:42:48.000 Was it incompetence?

00:42:49.000 Was it racism?

00:42:50.000 Was it because Trump wanted this or Trump wanted that?

00:42:52.000 And then you worry about those cases.

00:42:55.000 But the problem for the prosecutor is, When you decide to decline, not bring a case, there is an impulse.

00:43:01.000 And clearly, Jim Comey, who I once upon a time worked for, and I have respect for, and I think he tells the truth, even though he's made mistakes.

00:43:09.000 He was on the horns of a dilemma, not the way he describes a dilemma, but it was, in his mind, for good faith reasons, Hillary Clinton should not have been charged, based on how other similarly situated people have been treated under that particular statute over time.

00:43:25.000 And he—I get this, because I had the same—trust me, I've gotten a lot of criticism for cases that I brought and for cases that I didn't bring.

00:43:31.000 And he thought to himself, look, if people just understand that I'm a good-faith actor here, and the FBI, which I love and adore and appreciate and respect, revere even, They didn't do anything wrong.

00:43:43.000 What bothered him, I think, and it's bothered me many times in cases that I have had to oversee, I don't want them to think that this was political.

00:43:50.000 I don't want them to think they didn't do it by the book.

00:43:52.000 So I'm going to say all this stuff and be open about it.

00:43:55.000 That gets you into a lot of trouble.

00:43:57.000 When we close those cases, learning a little bit from that example, or confirming our view from that example, when you close a case that everyone knows has been opened, Especially when it involves a political figure, and people have views about that person—not based on the law, not based on some transgressions, but based on their view of whether or not that person should be in office or not, because they like their policies or not, or they trust them or not, or they voted for them or not—you've got to keep your mouth shut, because it causes a lot of problems.

00:44:26.000 But it does lead to—unfortunately, I don't have a solution for this or an answer to this—it leads to this dilemma, where people can't fully trust the decision to decline.

00:44:34.000 Now, that's the case.

00:44:36.000 With all ordinary prosecutions, and the way I distinguish Mueller, a couple things.

00:44:40.000 First, you know, remember Mueller didn't release the report.

00:44:44.000 President Trump's, you know, alleged buddy, Bill Barr, released the report.

00:44:47.000 You know, Bill Barr could have come up with some reason, because he doesn't seem to mind criticism too much, even though there was a full report that was written by Bob Mueller to Bill Barr.

00:44:57.000 Remember, we've gone so far in this whole process that people have forgotten that one of the original worries that a lot of people had was, is any of the report going to become public?

00:45:06.000 Is all of it going to become public?

00:45:07.000 Is Bill Barr going to, you know, shut it all down?

00:45:10.000 Bill Barr made the decision to take this explosive report, in particular Volume 2, and put it out in the public.

00:45:16.000 He did a summary, which he did very cleverly, I thought, then he puts out the whole report.

00:45:20.000 So it was not Mueller.

00:45:22.000 Mueller clearly may have expected that it becomes public or not, but his mandate, Bob Mueller's mandate, is a very odd thing, right?

00:45:28.000 I guess my question is more about the mandate than it is about Mueller's activity, meaning at a certain point shouldn't Mueller, I mean at the very outset, if he really believed the DOG regulations prevented him from recommending or not recommending prosecution and that the president can't be prosecuted so long as he's in office anyway.

00:45:44.000 Shouldn't you have just said, so what am I doing here?

00:45:46.000 Like what?

00:45:47.000 Well, so the reason why.

00:45:49.000 You never investigated a case you weren't allowed to prosecute.

00:45:51.000 No, look, correct.

00:45:53.000 And I have memos like that.

00:45:55.000 And those memos get written all the time.

00:45:57.000 I have lengthy memos that I read all the time.

00:45:59.000 The difference was, in the ordinary case—and we'll get to why that's not ordinary—in the ordinary case, you're absolutely right, and people should understand this.

00:46:06.000 We're investigating, you know, the mayor of a town, for example, or a police officer or someone else, and there are considerations on both sides.

00:46:13.000 And my team would put together a memo, and I would read it.

00:46:16.000 And at the end, there would be a recommendation.

00:46:18.000 We would have a discussion.

00:46:18.000 I would say, you know what?

00:46:19.000 I don't know that there's enough evidence on this stuff.

00:46:21.000 Can you flesh this out more?

00:46:22.000 Can you maybe show me a videotape of that transaction or whatever the case may be?

00:46:25.000 And then you decide.

00:46:26.000 And you either charge because you think you have enough or you go home and nobody ever sees that memo.

00:46:31.000 There's no requirement for anybody to see that memo because you're talking about an ordinary citizen.

00:46:35.000 And if the prosecutor can't do anything about that person, then that's the end.

00:46:40.000 Although there are some circumstances in which you think the prosecutor can maybe refer that person for disciplinary action or something else.

00:46:46.000 This is a little bit like that.

00:46:48.000 So because the president, uniquely among all human beings in the United States of America, is not, according to the OLC opinions, right, that I'm sure your listeners are now familiar with, is not subject to being criminally charged while still in office, But the principle still remains that no one is above the law, right?

00:47:06.000 That there has to be some accountability.

00:47:07.000 Well, unlike the random people that I'm talking about in my hypotheticals, who can't be subject to any other accountability, the president can be.

00:47:15.000 On the one hand, he has this shield, which is the OLC opinion.

00:47:18.000 On the other hand, he has to face the sword of potential impeachment.

00:47:22.000 And so that's why a lot of people, myself included, although I think the language is more abstruse than it needed to be, in volume two, Bob Mueller seemed to be saying, although he doesn't say it forthrightly, and I agree with you on the weirdness of it, and it's totally bizarre on this score, but if he had written it differently and if he had said, I think we'd maybe have less of a debate, he said, look, we cannot charge the president for these reasons, because the OLC has found that to be unconstitutional to charge a sitting president.

00:47:48.000 However, and he alludes to this, but he doesn't say it quite this way, however, We have uncovered serious misconduct.

00:47:55.000 We have uncovered all sorts of things that happened with respect to obstruction.

00:47:58.000 We cannot say that a crime has not been committed.

00:48:00.000 We cannot exonerate the president.

00:48:02.000 There is another body.

00:48:03.000 It's called— Yeah, I mean, it's pretty clear that's what he was doing.

00:48:05.000 Yeah, but if he had said— I mean, it was a road map for hostile impeachment.

00:48:07.000 But I guess, just going back to your original question, which is a good one and a fair one, if he had said those things explicitly, Would you still have the same argument that he should have shut down on day one because what the hell is he doing?

00:48:20.000 I mean, yes, because again, he's in the executive branch, meaning the Congress does have its own investigative tools and having the DOJ under the unitary executive theory.

00:48:31.000 You have Trump who's presiding over the DOJ.

00:48:35.000 Having the DOJ investigate the President on behalf of Congress is a very weird situation.

00:48:40.000 I mean, usually the DOJ is investigating on behalf of the DOJ.

00:48:43.000 It's not investigating on behalf of the legislative body with its own separate and unique capacity to investigate.

00:48:49.000 And if you want to investigate President Trump for a crime he commits while in office, well, again, he's subject to impeachment.

00:48:53.000 That's what Congress is for.

00:48:54.000 And if you want to wait until afterward, then you can prosecute him afterward for any investigation.

00:48:59.000 I understand the point.

00:49:00.000 But the problem is, this was not a discreet thing about whether or not Donald Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue, and there are no other actors, no other participants, and you could make—in that circumstance, I think you have a more valid point, right?

00:49:12.000 They're like, well, what the hell are we going to do here?

00:49:15.000 Because we can't charge the president.

00:49:16.000 We're not going to do this as a proxy for Congress or someone else.

00:49:20.000 And I kind of get that.

00:49:21.000 Because, you know, at the outset, the only thing we're going to uncover is coupleability on the part of the president or not.

00:49:25.000 And that's it.

00:49:26.000 And it's a contained universe, right?

00:49:28.000 This was not that.

00:49:30.000 This was the farthest thing from a contained universe.

00:49:32.000 There's millions of things they're looking at.

00:49:33.000 There's lots and lots of people, both on the Russia side and on the obstruction side.

00:49:37.000 There's lots of people who might have been implicated.

00:49:38.000 There's lots of people who have been charged.

00:49:40.000 And in the course of doing this investigation—not of the president, I think it's not the right way to look at it—in the course of doing this very broad, I think, appropriate investigation that began, I believe, in good faith, About interference in our election and looking at all sorts of people, including Roger Stone and everyone else.

00:49:54.000 And in the course of looking at all this stuff, which we write about in volume one and in volume two, some of the stuff relates to the president.

00:50:03.000 And it would be kind of an awkward thing to close your eyes to what the president was doing while you're trying to tell the story and figure out all the things that are going on.

00:50:13.000 And then secondly, once you have all this information and you gained all this evidence, You know, to write a report that you're supposed to give to the Attorney General talking about everybody except the President on the basis that, at the end of the day, you can't charge the President.

00:50:26.000 You know what I mean?

00:50:26.000 Like, all these things are so intertwined, inextricably, that I get your point, but it would be an awkward thing to do in practice.

00:50:33.000 So in a second, I want to ask you about your record as a prosecutor.

00:50:36.000 I want to talk about your actual book.

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00:51:26.000 ExpressVPN is incredibly reliable, it's the fastest VPN service I've tried, Okay, so let's talk about your actual record as a prosecutor.

00:51:31.000 So you were an incredibly famous, high-powered prosecutor.

00:51:33.000 There's rumors that the Paul Giamatti character in Billions is based on you.

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00:51:47.000 Okay, so let's talk about your actual record as a prosecutor.

00:51:51.000 So you were an incredibly famous high-powered prosecutor.

00:51:54.000 There's rumors that the Paul Giamatti character in Billions is based on you.

00:51:58.000 Do you know if that's true, by the way?

00:51:59.000 There's a very fine Indian-American actor, Paul Giamatti.

00:52:02.000 No, I...

00:52:05.000 For a lot of reasons, both professional and personal, I don't think there's a lot of resemblance between Paul Giamatti and if you've watched the show, people, my home life is different from his home life.

00:52:20.000 Very, very different.

00:52:22.000 But you were obviously very high-powered and you brought a lot of high-profile cases.

00:52:26.000 A lot of those high-profile cases, the one that put you on the cover of Time magazine was an insider trading case.

00:52:31.000 What was your theory of prosecuting insider trading?

00:52:33.000 How much evidence did you feel that you required in order to prosecute an insider trading case?

00:52:38.000 And also, generally, people have tremendous suspicion of Wall Street.

00:52:41.000 How prominent is insider trading?

00:52:43.000 I mean, if you watch Billions, they're going poisoning chickens.

00:52:45.000 Right.

00:52:46.000 So today, I don't keep so many tabs.

00:52:48.000 I think it's gone down, at least a certain kind of insider trading.

00:52:51.000 So there are a lot of people who suggest that insider trading is a victimless crime.

00:52:55.000 I don't think that's true.

00:52:56.000 I think you can have the victimization of companies whose private information is being sold on essentially a black market.

00:53:05.000 Material non-public information is being given to other folks, which undermines the integrity of their numbers.

00:53:10.000 But also, by the way, depending on the nature of the trade, there are people on the other side of the trade.

00:53:14.000 You're making the trade based on inside information that the merger is going to happen or the merger is not going to happen. 0.88

00:53:17.000 And there's someone on the other side of that who's the sucker in that.

00:53:21.000 And then overall, I think, It diminishes people's respect, you know, for the market.

00:53:25.000 Look, one thing that Donald Trump has said that is correct, a couple things he's said correct, that bears on this.

00:53:29.000 You know, there is a swamp.

00:53:30.000 I just don't think he's draining it.

00:53:32.000 And a lot of the system, in a lot of ways, is rigged.

00:53:35.000 And a little bit, you know, I was surprised at how much attention was brought to bear on the insider trading cases.

00:53:39.000 I've always said, they're not the most important cases we did.

00:53:43.000 Nobody died.

00:53:44.000 But they were important.

00:53:45.000 And I think part of the reason people paid a lot of attention to them is People get very upset, and it resonates with them when they see people of privilege and wealth, which a lot of these people were, if not all of these people.

00:53:55.000 I mean, there was a billionaire named Raj Rajaratnam.

00:53:57.000 Had a billion dollars.

00:53:58.000 Do you have a billion dollars?

00:53:59.000 It's close.

00:53:59.000 I do not.

00:53:59.000 Unfortunately.

00:54:00.000 Not yet.

00:54:00.000 With this empire?

00:54:02.000 I mean, if you can advise me behind the scenes on how to conduct this insider trading of which you speak, then one day.

00:54:02.000 One day.

00:54:07.000 You can just claim you have billions.

00:54:08.000 That works too.

00:54:08.000 And then you say your tax returns are under audit.

00:54:10.000 So I provide that template.

00:54:12.000 Perfect.

00:54:13.000 So I'm a billionaire.

00:54:14.000 But there's a person with a billion dollars, and he's still cheating to make, you know, a few extra million dollars.

00:54:19.000 And that makes people really angry.

00:54:21.000 With respect to what kinds of proof you need, to the extent people have said that it's sort of murky and the rules are unclear, in the criminal system, I think it's very important to make sure that your cases are clear, that you have clear proof of intent, you have clear proof of the trades that you're saying were illicitly done, and that you have essentially smoking gun proof of those things.

00:54:42.000 And there are a lot of insider trading cases that couldn't be brought.

00:54:44.000 I mean, in the buildup to some of these cases we were bringing, because word got out that things were going on for reasons that are not good, Without reading the complaints, without reading the indictments, some people thought, well, you're sort of overreaching.

00:54:56.000 Preet Bharara's U.S.

00:54:57.000 Attorney's Office is going too far, and they're going after the gray area.

00:55:00.000 I don't think, if you look at any of the cases we brought, and we brought scores and scores of cases, it was often really clear, common-sense evidence, right?

00:55:08.000 Because remember, and this is sort of parallel to some of the things we've been talking about with the Mueller investigation and arguments made on behalf of the president.

00:55:15.000 You see a dead body in the street, bullet in the heart, and if you can quickly rule out the person didn't, you know, die by suicide, then it's almost certainly a homicide unless it's self-defense.

00:55:26.000 But you pretty much ruled everything out.

00:55:28.000 So you know a crime has been committed because you're not supposed to shoot people on the street.

00:55:32.000 But lots and lots of criminal activity.

00:55:34.000 It consists of acts that are by themselves completely lawful.

00:55:38.000 Not only completely lawful, but part of the obligation of the actor.

00:55:41.000 So, for example, it is part of the obligation of a sitting legislator to vote.

00:55:46.000 It is part of the business plan, a perfectly legitimate capitalist business plan, for a hedge fund to trade, to buy a stock, to sell a stock, to go long, to go short.

00:55:55.000 All those things are legitimate.

00:55:57.000 The thing that makes those cases hard to prove without some smoking gun proof of intent, what's in the head?

00:56:02.000 Is that they can say, look, we had this research, there were good faith reasons why we bought this stock.

00:56:06.000 So it's actually an incredibly hard case to make, unless you sometimes have an insider.

00:56:10.000 I'll give you an example of a case.

00:56:12.000 People would say, how do you know, a version of the question you just asked me, how do you know when you have enough to bring a case?

00:56:17.000 And one I talk about in the book, we had a guy who, in the wake of this big Wall Street Journal article that broke on a Friday evening, Where the reporter in that story said that the U.S.

00:56:30.000 Attorney's Office and the FBI together were bringing massive insider trading cases in the future.

00:56:35.000 A guy who had been engaging in insider trading decided, Don Longill, decided that he was going to take the flash drive in which he had insider information and smash it to pieces and get rid of it.

00:56:48.000 We had no idea that that happened, and we never had any idea that that happened, except for the fact that later, as I describe in the book, there was another guy who was his best man who decided to flip when approached by an FBI agent who was leading these investigations.

00:57:04.000 And when that guy flipped, months later, he went to the apartment of the person who destroyed the evidence wearing a wire.

00:57:12.000 And the other person trusted him, shouldn't have, and basically got him to confess that on the night the Wall Street Journal article came out, he took his flash drive, he bashed it to pieces with pliers, he walked out of his apartment at midnight or one o'clock in the morning in New York City, found multiple garbage trucks who were in the streets, and deposited the remains of various bits of the flash drive in those garbage trucks.

00:57:34.000 We indicted that guy and we were able to secure a guilty plea from him because of this other.

00:57:38.000 So that's the kind of evidence.

00:57:40.000 Not always so clear.

00:57:41.000 In the absence of having a wiretap, in the absence of having something more direct, you need stuff like that.

00:57:47.000 And we also, by the way, it wasn't my idea.

00:57:49.000 People before my time pioneered the idea of doing wiretap, using the tool of the wiretap to do insider trading investigations as well.

00:57:56.000 That gives you the kind of evidence you need, too.

00:57:58.000 And is it really all that common?

00:57:59.000 Because if you watch the media.

00:58:01.000 It was pretty common.

00:58:01.000 I said it was rampant at the time and got a lot of attention.

00:58:03.000 I can't remember the exact number.

00:58:05.000 I think we brought over a hundred cases, and I thought we were only touching the tip of the iceberg.

00:58:09.000 So I think there had not been a lot of enforcement.

00:58:10.000 I think, you know, there was a generation of insider trading enforcement under Rudy Giuliani, you know, many, many years earlier.

00:58:16.000 And then there was this that, again, began before I got there, but then we continued and expanded our investigations and prosecutions.

00:58:22.000 Yeah.

00:58:23.000 Well, look, it's common sense.

00:58:25.000 When people are around, The opportunity to engage in that kind of conduct, right?

00:58:31.000 They're privy to inside information.

00:58:32.000 There's not a lot of policing of the conveyance of that inside information.

00:58:36.000 And people don't think there's been enforcement actions either by the SEC or by prosecutor's offices.

00:58:41.000 They engage in the behavior because there's no punishment.

00:58:44.000 And so I like to think, you know, that enforcement Especially when you're talking about people who are privileged and smart and can do a legitimate cost-benefit analysis, it brings the conduct down.

00:58:54.000 On sort of a policy level, as a prosecutor, what do you do when the law is just a law you don't like?

00:59:00.000 You saw this with President Obama in DACA, for example, just saying, I don't want to prosecute illegal immigration crimes for DREAMers. 0.76

00:59:07.000 There are a lot of libertarians out there who are looking at insider trading laws, as you suggest, and they're saying, OK, well, now you just have freer flow of information to the market.

00:59:15.000 The market now prices in a bunch of information that was going to get priced in anyway.

00:59:18.000 It was just priced in sooner.

00:59:20.000 So let's say that you are a prosecutor.

00:59:21.000 You don't like that law.

00:59:22.000 What do you think the obligation is to prosecute violations of laws that you find foolhardy?

00:59:28.000 So I don't think that's up to individual sort of line prosecutors to make as a general matter.

00:59:33.000 You should not go into that job unless you have a generalized comfort with enforcing the laws, you know, within proper discretion and with respect to what justice requires.

00:59:46.000 And I have a whole chapter on this also, right?

00:59:47.000 It does not mean that with respect to every case and every law and every statute, no matter how broadly written and how unenforced up to that time, that that means you do everything possible that a prosecutor is capable of doing legitimately.

01:00:04.000 And I say, and I think this is true, if every prosecutor did everything they could possibly do and threw the book at everyone they could possibly do it at, and had infinite resources, we'd be living in a hellscape.

01:00:11.000 And lots and lots and lots of people would be—if you think mass incarceration is a problem now, it'd be multiple times worse.

01:00:17.000 So you have to pick and choose.

01:00:18.000 I'm one of the few commentators in America who doesn't actually think mass incarceration is a giant problem, so.

01:00:22.000 Okay.

01:00:23.000 Well, for another day, perhaps.

01:00:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:00:26.000 And I'm a prosecutor, and I do.

01:00:27.000 But I had the luxury, being in the federal system, where we had a lot of resources, and we could pick and choose our cases, and we could decide what our priorities were.

01:00:35.000 In some ways, we had more resources than your average DA's office.

01:00:38.000 In some ways, we had less, because we had the resources of the FBI.

01:00:41.000 But, you know, we didn't have as many people as, for example, the Manhattan DA's office.

01:00:44.000 There were more assistant district attorneys in the city of New York, by far, than there were assistant U.S.

01:00:49.000 attorneys in the federal system.

01:00:51.000 And we tried to pick off the big fish.

01:00:53.000 So, you decide to pursue what you think is in the interest of justice based on the resources you have and the threats to the public.

01:00:58.000 So, for example, on the issue of organized crime, we talked about that.

01:01:04.000 As enforcement actions started to yield some success and the mafia problem began to become a little bit less and fewer bodies were turning up in the Hudson River, you could reduce resources.

01:01:13.000 You could have fewer people working dedicated to that.

01:01:15.000 And I was one of the people who was dedicated to that when I was a line prosecutor back in the early 2000s.

01:01:20.000 So you can reduce that assignment.

01:01:22.000 You can reduce that at the FBI.

01:01:24.000 The thing that was coming up at the time that I became the U.S.

01:01:26.000 Attorney was cybercrime.

01:01:27.000 Not that many people were expert in it.

01:01:28.000 Not that many people knew how to prosecute it.

01:01:31.000 Not that many people had, I think, the technological expertise and the amount of resources that were expended on that.

01:01:38.000 Those laws have been on the books for a long time.

01:01:40.000 It's just that you've started to see much, much greater bad actions by nation-states, by Lilzek and these other, you know, the hacktivists, as they call them, and other people who are just trying to make a buck by stealing money out of your bank account from a laptop in Latvia.

01:01:57.000 So you decide how you're going to balance your resources.

01:02:01.000 You've got the mob problem.

01:02:02.000 You've got a cyber epidemic going on around the world.

01:02:05.000 We'll do a little less here.

01:02:06.000 We'll do a little bit more here.

01:02:07.000 That means that maybe some crimes you're not prosecuting.

01:02:10.000 People understand it when you talk about it in that way, right?

01:02:13.000 It's like any business person has to make a decision of allocation of resources, right?

01:02:16.000 It's a market-based analysis.

01:02:18.000 I'll give you another area that's less easy to sort of understand.

01:02:22.000 It's more controversial because it goes to the immigration debate.

01:02:25.000 So I don't think of it as you can just sort of forget about a law because you don't like the law.

01:02:29.000 You have to think about, given the resources you have, should you be expending time and energy in a particular way?

01:02:35.000 So there's lots of debate about the border and the separation of children from their parents, which I think is a terrible thing and doesn't have to be done that way.

01:02:43.000 These laws have been on the books for a long time.

01:02:44.000 People keep talking about there's a law 1325 and there's a law, USC 1326.

01:02:50.000 One is about illegal entry, right?

01:02:52.000 You come across the border, you're not a criminal, you've never been in the country before, should you be thrown in jail?

01:02:57.000 Should you prosecute that?

01:02:58.000 And there's a debate among the Democrats, which a little bit is an idle debate, I will say, on whether or not you should repeal 1325 and should that be dealt with civilly or not.

01:03:07.000 And then you have subsections of 1326, Which is the most relevant to our practice.

01:03:14.000 You have a provision that says, if you have been in the United States, and you're undocumented, and you committed a crime, a felony, aggravated felony, and then you have been prosecuted for it, and then you were deported, and then you now come back into the country, You can be prosecuted for that.

01:03:30.000 Now, when you're deciding, in New York City, where you have Wall Street crime and you have terrorism, which is a huge priority, and you have cybercrime and you have the mob, and you have political corruption, all those things, and you have only 165 assistant U.S.

01:03:43.000 attorneys, how much energy are you going to expend prosecuting a human who literally did nothing other than come across the border?

01:03:52.000 and expend the resources of the government, expend the resources of the Bureau of Prisons, as opposed to just kicking them back out of the country?

01:03:59.000 How do you pick and choose among that category of person who's violating either the weakest section of the statute versus the strongest?

01:04:06.000 And before I got there, this is under a Republican administration, the policy decision was made just in terms of proper exercise of resources and exercise of discretion that we would prioritize the prosecution of people who were in the country who had already been kicked out after committing a crime.

01:04:23.000 And we don't have the time.

01:04:25.000 In the same way, that might be controversial to some people.

01:04:28.000 And they might say, well, you don't like the law or you don't like the immigration policy.

01:04:31.000 It's really a common-sense application of principles of resources to the problem.

01:04:36.000 Nobody thinks twice, if you say.

01:04:39.000 And a lot of offices had this threshold.

01:04:41.000 So you prosecute credit card fraud.

01:04:43.000 And often it's the Secret Service, sometimes it's the FBI.

01:04:46.000 And they would say, well, depending on how much credit card fraud or bank fraud was at issue, we'll take the case.

01:04:53.000 Nobody's taking the $340 bank fraud case.

01:04:57.000 It's not because you don't like that law.

01:04:59.000 It's not because you think that's not worthwhile.

01:05:01.000 It's not because you don't feel bad for that victim, because maybe the person doesn't have a lot of money.

01:05:04.000 $340 is a lot for them.

01:05:05.000 But every agent I put, because it's the same amount of investigation often, I put an agent and an AUSA and a paralegal and a secretary on the $340 credit card fraud or bank fraud case.

01:05:17.000 How many $1 million cases—because there's plenty of million-dollar cases—I can't do.

01:05:20.000 So, in some ways, I think we over-politicize, because everyone is so into politics and about, you know, Trump and not Trump and about immigration and the border and everything else.

01:05:30.000 I think we should allow local prosecutors, U.S.

01:05:32.000 attorneys or otherwise, to exercise—as long as it's in good faith and it's based on reason and rationality, which I think we both like.

01:05:39.000 To decide, are we going to spend our time going after turnstile jumpers, or are we going to spend our time going after domestic violence?

01:05:47.000 If you're a DA, for example.

01:05:49.000 Or in my office's case, going after people who just—their only potential crime is that they're in the country and they shouldn't be, and they have no record.

01:05:58.000 Because there's an opportunity cost.

01:05:59.000 People forget that when you make decisions like this, there's always an opportunity cost.

01:06:03.000 Like there is an opportunity cost, separate and apart from, I think, So, in one second, I have one final question for Preet Bharara.

01:06:10.000 That question is, is President Trump himself a threat to the rule of law?

01:06:13.000 But if you want to hear his answer, you have to be a DailyWire subscriber.

01:06:16.000 We ask a sexy question, so you go subscribe.

01:06:17.000 Go subscribe at DailyWire.com.

01:06:17.000 its policy.

01:06:18.000 So in one second, I have one final question for Preet Bharara.

01:06:21.000 That question is, is President Trump himself a threat to the rule of law?

01:06:24.000 But if you want to hear his answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:06:27.000 We ask a sexy question, so you go subscribe.

01:06:29.000 Go subscribe at dailywire.com.

01:06:30.000 Click subscribe and watch the rest of our conversation there.

01:06:33.000 I really appreciate you stopping.

01:06:34.000 Thanks for having me, sir.

01:06:35.000 It really has been a pleasure.

01:06:36.000 And congratulations on the book.

01:06:37.000 It's called Doing Justice, folks.

01:06:37.000 Thank you so much.

01:06:38.000 You should go pick it up.

01:06:38.000 And listen to my podcast, too.

01:06:40.000 Stay tuned to the prequel.

01:06:40.000 Oh, of course.

01:06:41.000 Go check that out.

01:06:42.000 Thank you, sir.

01:06:43.000 Thank you, sir.

01:06:54.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:06:56.000 Associate producer Colton Haas.

01:06:58.000 Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.

01:07:00.000 Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.

01:07:03.000 Editing by Donovan Fowler.

01:07:05.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.

01:07:07.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:07:09.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:07:11.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 27, 2019

Preet Bharara | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 74

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