In style, Bharara is unlike his predecessors. He sometimes acts like a budding pol with a gift for wisecracks and shtick. Photograph by Platon for The New Yorker

As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara runs one of the largest and most respected offices of federal prosecutors in the country. Under his leadership, the office has charged dozens of Wall Street figures with insider trading, and has upended the politics of New York State, by convicting the leaders of both houses of the state legislature. Last week, Bharara announced charges against a hundred and twenty alleged street-gang members in the Bronx, in what was said to be the largest gang takedown in New York history. The turning point in Bharara’s own career, though, took place not when he triumphed in a courtroom but when he masterminded a dramatic congressional hearing.

Bharara, who is now forty-seven, graduated from Columbia Law School in 1993, spent several years at private firms, and then, from 2000 to 2005, served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, in Manhattan. On leaving his A.U.S.A. post, he made an unusual choice for a promising young lawyer. Instead of becoming a partner at a law firm, he went to Washington to work for Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat. Schumer chaired the Judiciary Committee’s oversight subcommittee, and Bharara was the top aide on his staff. He organized hearings and prepared Schumer for conducting them. Schumer is famous for cultivating media attention, and his aides are responsible for making sure that he gets it.

“When Chuck approaches a hearing, he wants to elicit something, leave a mark, unearth something that the A.P. will file a story on,” a Schumer staffer from this era told me. “Preet knew this, and he would take the pen and make the first draft of questions that made Chuck’s round of questioning stand out. He would draft them with sound bites in mind. He learned to think that way and write that way.” In early 2007, Bharara, under Schumer’s supervision, was investigating the firing of several U.S. Attorneys by Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General in President George W. Bush’s second term. For a hearing on May 15th, the issue was whether the firings had been politically motivated. Bharara prepared James Comey, who had been Deputy Attorney General in the Bush Administration, to testify.

“That was my hearing, chaired by Senator Schumer,” Bharara told me. He knew the witness well, because Comey had been the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District when Bharara was an A.U.S.A. there. “I talked to Jim the week before and said, ‘We’re going to have you come testify.’ ” In debriefing Comey before his testimony, Bharara heard a more extraordinary tale than he had expected. On the night of March 10, 2004, Comey had learned that Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, were heading to a Washington hospital, where John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, suffering from gallstone pancreatitis, was in intensive care. Gonzales and Card wanted Ashcroft to reauthorize a government surveillance program that Comey and his staff had concluded was unlawful. Comey and Robert Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, raced, sirens blaring, to beat Gonzales and Card to Ashcroft’s bedside. In a tense confrontation at the hospital, Ashcroft told Gonzales and Card that, since Comey was Acting Attorney General, the decision was his to make.

As Bharara recalled, “Jim told me the whole story on the phone, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck, because I realized what a significant story this was, and I was sworn to secrecy and nobody knew about it. I told Chuck. He was, like, ‘_Whoa!’ _” In the days leading up to the hearing, Bharara and Schumer told no one about the revelation that was coming. “I was afraid that if the story got out of what Jim was going to say the Bush Administration would figure out a way to prevent him from testifying,” Bharara said. “We needed to preserve the element of surprise.”

At the committee hearing, Comey, under Schumer’s questioning, told the story of the bedside confrontation. It caused a sensation in the hearing room and in the press. “Russ Feingold”—the Wisconsin Democrat—“said after that that it was the most amazing and jaw-dropping hearing he had ever attended as a senator,” Bharara told me. “So that was my formative experience.” Less than two years later, when Barack Obama was elected President, Schumer recommended that he nominate Bharara as the United States Attorney for the Southern District.

Bharara was forty, and he brought a media-friendly approach to what has historically been a closed and guarded institution. In professional background, Bharara resembles his predecessors; in style, he’s very different. His personality reflects his dual life in New York’s political and legal firmament. A longtime prosecutor, he sometimes acts like a budding pol; his rhetoric leans more toward the wisecrack than toward the jeremiad. He expresses himself in the orderly paragraphs of a former high-school debater, but with deft comic timing and a gift for shtick.

Bharara’s success with Comey’s testimony prefigured some of the methods he has used as prosecutor. He believes in meticulous preparation and reveres the tradition of collegiality among current and former Southern District prosecutors, like Comey and like him. He also welcomes publicity.

The U.S. Attorney’s main office is housed in 1 St. Andrew’s Plaza, a brutalist carbuncle beside the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, a classical-revival gem in lower Manhattan. Next to the door of Bharara’s office suite, there is a large-format photograph of a reunion dinner of Southern District prosecutors, at the Plaza Hotel, in 2014: hundreds of middle-aged white men in tuxedos. For decades, a stint as an A.U.S.A. for the Southern District has led to prosperous anonymity in the upper reaches of the legal profession, especially in major New York law firms. And Bharara’s predecessors in the top job include Robert Morgenthau (1962-1970), who later became the Manhattan district attorney; Rudolph Giuliani (1983-89), subsequently the two-term mayor of New York; Mary Jo White (1993-2002), the current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Comey (2002-03), now the director of the F.B.I.

“At least since the time of Morgenthau, the Southern District has been known for integrity and innovation,” Jed Rakoff, who was a prosecutor in the Southern District before he became a judge there, in 1996, told me. “The Southern District was the first U.S. Attorney’s office to take on white-collar crime on a regular basis. It led the way in official corruption cases,” as well as in Mafia cases and in terrorism cases.

“And can one illuminate the manuscript?” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

“There’s a tradition of independence in the Southern District,” Rakoff said. “And that has often led to tension with the Justice Department.” Indeed, in law-enforcement circles the Southern District is nicknamed the “sovereign district,” because of its reputation for resisting direction, even from its nominal superiors, in Washington.

Some have said, half-jokingly, that the Southern District is the only U.S. Attorney’s office with its own foreign policy. In 2013, Bharara’s office charged Devyani Khobragade, then the Deputy Consul General of India in New York, with committing visa fraud in order to gain entry for an Indian domestic worker in her employ. Khobragade was strip-searched after her arrest, and the government of India demanded an apology and removed the security barricades in front of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed regret about Khobragade’s treatment. Bharara told me that the case originated in the State Department, and was properly vetted by his office. (Khobragade, who still faces charges, has gone back to India.)