Legal News

Preet Bharara: Pol or Prosecutor? Signs Point to the Latter

By Ashby Jones

So who is this Preet Bharara fellow? We’ve blogged about him several times before (here, here and ), but not since he was confirmed on Friday to be the new U.S. attorney in Manhattan, one of the nation’s more prominent prosecutorial positions.

An NYT profile out Monday helps fill in the details on Bharara, and helps answer one of our chief questions about him: Will Bharara, formerly the chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), be able to play it straight as a prosecutor, and extricate himself from the muddy world of politics?

The answer, in the minds of many, seems to be yes.

While Bharara played a major role in the Senate Judiciary Committee's investigation into the firings of United States attorneys around the country — an investigation that was, by its nature, political, Bharara won points from both sides of the aisle, writes the Times:

He even won over one fired prosecutor, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, a Republican who said he had wavered over whether to testify voluntarily before the panel, fearing that it would degenerate into a "partisan circus." But after their conversations, Mr. Iglesias said, he concluded that Mr. Bharara was approaching the investigation like a prosecutor, not a politician. "It gave me a lot of assurance,” Mr. Iglesias said. "He completely understood what was at stake here."

Some see Bharara’s experience on Capitol Hill as a potential advantage. “He contributes things that we've not seen before,” said Columbia professor Daniel Richman. "He's thought hard about what a U.S. attorney's place should be within a broader federal enforcement system and the train wrecks that can develop when unthinking or ill-thinking bureaucrats tamper with that."

But make no mistake, Bharara doesn’t appear to be a politician in prosecutors’ clothing. Aside from his work with Schumer and a stint with New York politician Mark Green in the early 1990s, he’s largely been on the straight-and-narrow lawyer path. In 2000, after about six years in private practice, Bharara (Harvard, Columbia Law) became a Southern District prosecutor. For five years, he prosecuted organized crime, narcotics and securities fraud, among other crimes.

In 2005, Bharara became Senator Schumer's chief counsel. In regard to the DOJ investigation, Bharara, in a bar association talk last year, said that the investigation's focus had been not only on whether there had been violations of law, but also on whether "the great traditions of the department were violated."

He added, "The more that was uncovered, the more it seemed clear that there was politicization," not only in how United States attorneys were being fired or hired, but even at the lowest level - "the line level," as he put it - "where there should never be any politics at all."

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 10, 2009 (boomark / email).