Blake Hounshell is the editor in chief of POLITICO Magazine.

Preet Bharara decided not to do the easy thing and write a made-for-TV book about the sprawling legal inquiries into Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency.

But that’s all anyone wants to ask the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York about, along with his personal view of the president who summarily fired him in March 2017 after assuring him he could stay.


Bharara, on his million-strong Twitter feed and his podcast, “Stay Tuned with Preet,” analyzes the Trump probes with the gimlet eye of an ex-prosecutor known for his media savvy and his takedowns of corrupt pols and Wall Street bad boys. And while he’s careful not to go beyond the facts — or dish what he knows from his old job — it takes little to entice Bharara to dive into Muellermania with the rest of us.

Bharara is critical of James Comey’s decision, in the heat of the 2016 campaign, to blast Hillary Clinton as “extremely careless” even as the FBI’s then-director was arguing that her email habits didn’t warrant prosecution. “The only way you can explain a decision not to prosecute is to talk a lot about the reason,” he says, citing the long-standing practice of declining to release derogatory information about a subject who isn’t charged with a crime. “It’s understandable, but it causes more harm than good, probably.”

But he thinks Robert Mueller, the special counsel brought in to investigate that allegedly tainted election after Trump fired Comey, will want to explain himself, at least privately. Bharara predicts Mueller will deliver a robust report to Attorney General William Barr that will lay out precisely why and how he decided to prosecute — or not — various individuals swept up in the Russia probe, including the president.

“He could give something bare-bones to the AG, because he’s said what he was going to say in publicly filed documents and indictments,” Bharara said in an interview. “Or, I think it’s slightly more likely — a hunch I have — that he’ll write a very lengthy, detailed document that goes into the prosecutions and the declinations at great length, with a lot of supporting exhibits as well.”

Then, he says, Barr will face an excruciating dilemma: how much of the report to reveal to Congress and to the public. Disclose too much, and he’ll anger his boss in the White House. Disclose too little, and Democrats will howl. With stakes this high, Americans’ confidence (or lack thereof) that Mueller’s inquiry has been rigorously impartial has become a proxy for our wheezing collective confidence in the justice system and even democracy itself, a subject that concerns Bharara greatly.

In leaky Washington, the broad outlines of such an explosive report likely wouldn’t stay hidden for long, Bharara predicts. “And once it is known that it’s” — he picks a number out of thin air — “a 480-page document, then let the games begin.”

Bharara argues that, unlike Clinton — or, say, a businessman suspected of defrauding a bank, but not ultimately charged with a crime — the president of the United States isn’t entitled to prosecutors' silence. So even if Americans never find out why minor Russiagate figures such as Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner weren’t charged, Congress should be told what, if any, role the president played in Russia’s efforts to elect him, along with what he did to cover it up.

“Donald Trump has a unique benefit and a literally unique system of accountability that no one else has,” Bharara says, pointing to Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted. “There’s something called impeachment. … And the only way in which Congress is going to have the ability to know [if Trump broke the law] without doing its own completely duplicative separate investigation,” he says, “is to get that information.”

His bottom line: “So I think the president stands alone.”

Parlor speculation aside, Bharara has written an engaging book about the law (“You sound surprised,” he quips when I tell him this) that comes at an urgent time in the United States, with America’s warring political tribes either losing faith in the justice system — a new poll suggests that half of Americans believe the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt" — or investing so much faith in the former FBI chief that many are bound to be disappointed by his final product.

“It was very important to me that this not be a book for lawyers and aspiring lawyers,” Bharara told me in an interview in one of his several post-SDNY offices — this one the concrete-floored media company founded by his entrepreneur brother, Vinit Bharara, and where his podcast is produced.

The book may nonetheless inspire a few young Americans to become the next Preet Bharara, but it also aims more broadly to impart lessons from his career on “how to do the right thing, how to exercise discretion, how to tell truth from falsehood, how to keep an open mind,” as he puts it. Part memoir, part guidebook and part leadership-circuit speaker-bait, “Doing Justice” makes for breezy reading given its weighty subject matter.

Unlike many other prominent prosecutor types, Bharara is loose and funny, practiced at speaking in layman’s terms and cracking jokes — including one we struck from the record. And the war stories he shares in the book all come with lessons that apply well beyond the law, from the infamous Menendez brothers case that taught him to hone his instincts to the story of a mob boss whose love of food induced him to confess to his crimes.

Bharara still has confidence in the justice system, even with Trump as its titular head. He isn’t especially troubled by the accusation that the president, through former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, tried to lean on his successor, Geoffrey Berman, to intervene in the SDNY’s probe of hush-money payments Trump allegedly made through his former lawyer.

“Berman has a professional reputation to uphold and he’s going to go into what the facts require because those are the kinds of people he leads. And he would have a revolution on his hands if he did,” Bharara says. “How is that going to work? The whole world will know about it in a minute and a half and your credibility as leader is shot.”

Bharara is concerned, however, about the larger state of American democracy in the age of Trump, and the gaps in the law he has exposed by flouting norms, such as: presidential candidates should release their tax returns, eliminate potential conflicts of interest once they win the White House and not hire their own children.

“We didn’t contemplate that someone was going to just defile them in that way,” says Bharara, a Democrat who is working on a democracy and rule-of-law task force with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican of decidedly pre-Trump vintage.

But he’s also concerned about ordinary Americans’ increasingly partisan view of how the law ought to work — he worries about those on the right who still chant “LOCK HER UP!” at Trump rallies, just as he worries about those on the left who think Mueller, rather than a political process, will deliver them from Trump. He sees little chance the Senate would convict Trump even if the House impeached him, barring some major revelations from Mueller.

“All these people who hope that he’s going to take this scourge of a man out of the White House are going to be really disappointed when he doesn’t do that,” Bharara says. “I think it’s perfectly possible that the Mueller report will not be that damaging to the president. And all of us need to be prepared to accept that and move on.”