Instead, Bharara, who now hosts the podcast “Stay Tuned With Preet,” spends his 368-page book walking readers through the experience of being a federal prosecutor. The chapters correspond to phases of a criminal trial, and the lessons within them are culled from Bharara’s work bringing high-profile cases like his crackdowns on insider trading, public corruption in Albany and terrorism.
In The New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Senior described “Doing Justice” as a memoir poured “into the mold of an advice book.”
In this conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Bharara discusses some of the philosophies that undergirded his work as a prosecutor.
Q. The Southern District of New York has been in the news a lot lately. Does part of you wish President Trump hadn’t fired you so that you could be at the center of all the excitement?
A. (Laughs.) Yeah, of course I miss that place. I say in the dedication to my book, “For my family and for the women and men of the Southern District of New York, the best place I will ever work.” Because whatever you think of them — sometimes people thought we were too tough, sometimes people thought we were too soft — but we tried at least to do the right thing. And everyone there tried at least to do the right thing. Part of your job, especially as the leader of the office, is to figure out new and lawful ways to keep people safe and to give people their money back and to hold people who violated their oaths of office accountable. There’s nothing more exhilarating than that. So I think any person would miss it.
Q. You write about the times when you decided to walk away from cases — including high-level executives who helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.
A.I spent a good amount of time in the book talking about how you make decisions and how you can’t go beyond the law and go beyond the facts. And none of the hundreds of career agents, career prosecutors, career regulatory enforcers — who, by the way, before they have government jobs, before they’re government workers, they’re American citizens and taxpayers and suffered as much as everyone else in the financial crisis — none of them saw a way, notwithstanding enormous amounts of work, energy spent, deep dives, that the law and facts supported charges.
That doesn’t mean that people didn’t do terrible things. People were reckless. People were negligent. Maybe some people broke the law. They were greedy. They cheated in various ways. But you can’t bring a case against someone unless you have the law and facts on your side. And, frustratingly for a lot of people, including the people who did the investigations, there was no such case that they could bring.
Q. Was justice done in the aftermath of the financial crisis?
A. Justice and the law are two different things. And I try to point out that distinction in the book. When you’re seeking relief from the court for having your constitutional rights trampled, but you file your brief one day late and they say, you’re out of luck — that’s the law. But that’s not justice.
I think there are people who are angry at financial institutions because they were greedy and because they were reckless and because they put themselves first and because they haven’t learned their lessons and because they have continued to take pay increases and they seem to not have learned their lesson about accountability to the public.
Yeah, I don’t think justice was done. Overall justice — cosmic justice, as they say. There’s a lot to be angry about and people have a lot to be sorry for. That is different from being able to prove in a particular case that a particular person committed a crime.
Q. What do you say to “armchair prosecutors,” as you call them in your book, who say you should have brought the cases anyway, and if the cases fell apart later on, then at least you made your point and tried your best?
A.I’m trying to think what kind of prosecutors’ offices those people would run. Because if that’s how you handle everything — that’s how you handle shootings, that’s how you handle the drug war, that’s how you handle robbery? This sort of rush to judgment, and not taking care to make sure you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s — and you barely have enough evidence to indict and take your shot and hope that you’re going to use anger and public outrage to convict people? That’s not a district I want to live in.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.