“We are not trying to criminalize ordinary politics,” Mr. Bharara said in a speech at New York Law School in 2015. Nor, he said, were his prosecutors seeking to wag their fingers, serve as “morality cops” or demand that officials be free of vice. “Just try not to steal our money,” he said. “We simply want people in high office to stop violating the law. It seems like a simple and modest request.”

By the time his public corruption unit had won the convictions of Mr. Silver and Mr. Skelos, Mr. Bharara had successfully prosecuted a dozen current or former state legislators, as well as 15 local officials, party leaders, political consultants and fund-raisers, including two current or former New York City Council members. Only one was acquitted.

Not all of Mr. Bharara’s public corruption inquiries led to criminal charges, most notably his sweeping examination of Mr. Cuomo’s abrupt shutdown in March 2014 of an anticorruption commission that the governor had formed with great fanfare just nine months earlier. A Times investigation published in July 2014 showed that before disbanding the panel, known as the Moreland Commission, Mr. Cuomo had hobbled its work, intervening when it focused on groups with ties to the governor or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.

But after an investigation that spanned more than a year, Mr. Bharara said in January 2016 that his office had concluded that “absent any additional proof that may develop, there is insufficient evidence to prove a federal crime.”

Yet the Moreland Commission was clearly not far from Mr. Bharara’s mind. On Sunday afternoon, he used a recently opened personal Twitter account to say, “By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like.”

Mr. Bharara’s investigation clearly stuck with Mr. Cuomo as well. In the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Cuomo, who has done little to hide his frustration with Mr. Bharara, told a Trump adviser in passing that the prosecutor was “a bad guy,” saying, “Preet is not your friend,” according to a person familiar with the discussion. (A Cuomo spokeswoman denied that the governor had made such a statement.)