Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has grown increasingly vocal about his interactions with President Donald Trump, who allegedly reneged on his promise to allow the famed New York City prosecutor to keep his job before unexpectedly demanding his resignation in March. For weeks after his ouster, Bharara stayed largely on the sidelines, fueling speculation about his next move in political circles. But now, in the wake of James Comey’s abrupt dismissal as F.B.I. director amid allegations that he resisted Trump’s requests for his loyalty, Bharara is speaking out—and suggesting that his own ouster was similarly motivated. “It appeared to be that he was trying to cultivate some kind of relationship [with me],” he told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, citing several chummy phone calls that Trump tried to initiate with him. “It’s a very weird and peculiar thing for a one-on-one conversation without the attorney general, without warning, between the president and me or any United States attorney who has been asked to investigate various things and is in a position hypothetically to investigate business interests and associates of the president.”

Bharara’s account appears to be bolstered by a ProPublica report published Tuesday, which suggests that Trump fired Bharara specifically to neutralize a potential political threat. According to four sources that spoke to ProPublica, Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s personal lawyer and his primary counsel on matters related to the Russia investigation, had bragged that he was largely responsible for getting the U.S. attorney for New York's Southern District fired. “This guy is going to get you,” Kasowitz recalled saying to Trump, according to one of the sources. (Kasowitz has not returned the Hive's request for comment.)

At the time, Bharara had been in the middle of multiple investigations with connections to Trump, including an inquiry into Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Fox News, and Deutsche Bank, Trump’s primary private lender, for its alleged ties to Russian money-laundering operations. Shortly after he was fired, Bharara also cryptically suggested that he had been investigating other matters involving Trump and corruption. Now that the job is vacant, Trump is free to appoint whomever he wants in Bharara’s place, giving that person the power to decide whether to drop those cases. One of the potential candidates for New York's Southern District, arguably the most powerful district in the country, is Edward McNally, a partner at Kasowitz’s law firm.

Beyond the obvious questions of political patronage, however, arise other concerns about the way that Trump and Kasowitz, who represented Trump in his most controversial lawsuits as a private citizen, operate. Trump has been surprisingly forthcoming about his reasons for firing Comey, confirming during an interview on national television that he had wanted to put a stop to “this Russia thing”—fueling allegations that he had sought to obstruct justice. (Later, reports emerged that Trump had bragged to Russian officials in the Oval Office that firing his “nut job” F.B.I. director had taken off “great pressure.”) Kasowitz, who released a statement last week accusing Comey of having perjured himself during his Senate testimony about Trump, is similarly aggressive. But if the accounts of Kasowitz’s boasting about getting Bharara fired are true, it’s possible that his behavior could cross the line into attempting to obstruct justice, too.