When Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, Preet Bharara, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, didn’t expect to lose his job—especially since Trump had personally told him that he could stay. When Trump suddenly demanded his resignation in March, Bharara refused, insisting that the president pull the trigger himself. “I was fired,” Bharara said Wednesday at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, in conversation with former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough. “The president of the United States has the absolute authority and power to fire anyone who works for him; attorneys and attorneys general and others work at the absolute rule of the president.”

The circumstances of his ouster, he explained, were somewhat unusual. Like a strange game of telephone, president-elect Trump had told Chuck Schumer after the election last year that he’d wanted Bharara to stay on during the Trump administration. Bharara says Trump asked for Bharara to come meet him on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. “It was a lovely meeting,” Bharara recalled. “I was there. The president-elect was there. [Steve] Bannon was there. Jared Kushner was there.” The friendly conversation was followed by several calls with the president, which Bharara described as unusual.

“I’ll note that half of us are now gone,” he said, referring to himself, Bannon, Kushner, and Trump. “It’s unclear how long the other half will stay.”

After the inauguration, Bharara stopped returning Trump’s calls, which he said might have created the appearance of impropriety. “It’s not an easy thing not to return the call of anyone who’s your boss,” he added, referring to a March 9 message left with his assistant. Twenty hours later he was asked for his resignation. “I don’t know that it’s nefarious,” he noted Wednesday. “I think all sorts of things are possible. It may be that he just wanted everyone out. There’s still not a replacement who was nominated for my position. And that was six or seven months ago.”

Video: When the President Asks for Your Resignation: Sally Yates and Preet Bharara On What Is and Isn’t Normal

Yates’s dismissal from the White House was similarly unceremonious. Hours after sending a memo to Justice Department lawyers urging them not to defend the White House’s first travel ban because she was not “convinced it was lawful,” the Trump White House released a statement announcing her replacement and accusing her of having “betrayed” her department. “I felt like resignation would have protected my personal integrity, but it wouldn’t have protected the integrity of the Department of Justice,” she said about her firing. “Within a few hours, later that evening, they had delivered a letter to me. Apparently they tried to do it by e-mail, I’m told, but the e-mail kept bouncing back.”