Trump was right to fire Preet Bharara

Fake News outlets portray Preet Bharara as a "storied prosecutor" who went after Wall Street and political corruption.

They have it half right. He took down some crooked politicians, but when it came to Wall Street, he let the crooks buy the Department of Justice off.


Obama appointed him as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, taking office on August 13, 2009. His turf included Wall Street.

Under Bush 43, that office successfully prosecuted a score of CEOs. Topping the list of those convicted was Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, who died before he could be sent to prison. The rest did prison time.

But Obama changed that. Through Preet Bharara, Barack Obama sold Get Out Of Jail Free cards to corrupt CEOs on Wall Street.

Instead of doing time for their crimes, Bharara let their companies pay fines that went into a Department of Justice slush fund that then funded Obama's extreme radical lefty buddies.

The press has known about this pay-to-get-away scheme for years.

From the Daily Caller on August 7, 2012:

A new report from the conservative Government Accountability Institute (GAI) finds that President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s failure to criminally charge any top Wall Street bankers is likely a result of cronyism inside the Department of Justice and political donations made to Obama’s campaign.

Despite Obama’s and Holder’s “heated rhetoric” against Wall Street (in 2009, Obama blamed the 2008 financial collapse on “reckless speculation of bankers” while Holder charged that “unscrupulous executives, Ponzi scheme operators and common criminals alike have targeted the pocketbooks and retirement accounts of middle class Americans”), they haven’t “filed a single criminal charge against any top executive of an elite financial institution,” GAI wrote in its report, exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller.

GAI argues that the Obama administration’s decision to not go after Big Finance is due to senior DOJ leadership — Holder, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, Associate Attorney General Tony West, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, Deputy Attorney General James Cole and Deputy Associate Attorney General Karol Mason — who “all came to the DOJ from prestigious white-collar defense firms where they represented the very financial institutions the DOJ is supposed to investigate.”

The report details how Holder and Breuer both came to the DOJ from Covington & Burling, a “top-tier Washington law firm” with a client list that includes financial firms like Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiBank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wilmington Trust.

Instead of sending CEOs to the slammer, Preet Bharara shook them down. Citibank paid a fine of $158 million in 2012, and agreed to pay $7 billion in 2014 to avoid criminal prosecutions.

JP Morgan paid $1.7 billion for its role in the Bernie Madoff scheme. President Bush's prosecutors got Madoff a sentence of 150 years in prison.

Bank of America agreed to a $1 billion fine in 2012.

Toyota agreed to a fine of $1.2 billion in 2014.

Yes, he did go after insider trading by the Galleon Group, whose principles were Indian-Americans like him. They went to prison. He also sent Republican Dinesh D'Souza to prison for election law violations.

In a tweet today, D'Souza said, "GOOD RIDDANCE DEPT: Obama capo @PreetBharara is a familiar Indian type, subservient to those above him but ruthless with those in his power."

To his credit, Bharara did go after Democratic politicians in New York, and 26 members of the Gambino crime family.

I am not saying the man was not a good prosecutor.

But he was far from a saint, and frankly we elected President Trump to drain the swamp. Bharara was the man who filled the Democratic Party's DoJ slush fund.

I won't miss him.

UPDATE, from Glenn Reynolds:

Here’s what I wrote back when Bharara subpoenaed Reason for its commenters’ names, and then put them under a gag order: “I continue to think that this is a case of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara doing one (or both) of two things: (1) Attempting a sort of brushback pitch regarding people talking smack about federal judges, to the effect of saying that we can’t punish you under the First Amendment but we’ll go after you anyway; and/or (2) doing a ‘favor’ for a judge before whom he has a lot of cases. Both seem like abuses of power to me.”

Trump should have fired him 51 days ago :)



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