Out of the 46 U.S. attorneys who left their offices last week, none did so with more theatricality and fanfare than Southern District of New York's Preet Bharara. The Monday after Donald Trump fired him with prejudice, the motor-mouthed scourge of Wall Street appeared at the top of the staircase at St. Andrews Plaza, waving to a crowd of aides, reporters, and camera crews waiting below. His wife, Dalya Bharara, stood behind him, holding a bouquet of flowers the size of a beach ball; his school-age children walked by his side as he shook hands with his former employees standing behind police barricades. And somewhere nearby, bagpiges—the eternal soundtrack of police funerals and 9/11 memorial services—wailed mournfully for the departing public servant.
Of course, the 48-year-old Bharara is very much alive, but the bagpipes, a bit overkill for a man leaving a job, seemed like the perfect coda to a weekend of high drama in the Justice Department. Few expected that Bharara, who had been appointed to the powerful office in 2009 by Barack Obama would be forced out by Trump, especially after Trump himself had told Bharara that he could keep his job. Fewer still could have anticipated the way that Bharara responded to the resignation request: by refusing to hand it in and daring the president to fire him. Within hours of his announcement, Bharara tweeted: “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired.” (The coda itself was not as masterfully executed as his tweet: after he finished descending the staircase, Bharara had to go back inside to get his car.)
It was a fitting way to end the prosecutorial career of a man who became famous for building an impenetrable wall of integrity around himself while chasing after corruption on Wall Street, in Albany, and wherever his ironclad sense of justice led him. At the same time, his proclivity for recognition caused his critics to grumble that for all the laudatory statements about his anti-corporate crusade—“The Man Who Terrifies Wall Street,” proclaimed the New Yorker—he had not actually struck at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis and the current economic malaise that helped Trump assume power. “Hedge funds are safer targets. The firms aren’t enmeshed in the global financial markets in the way that giant banks are,” wrote Jesse Eisenger of ProPublica. “Insider trading cases are relatively easy to win and don’t address systemic abuses that helped bring down the financial system.”
But perception is too often reality, and Bharara, that rare high-profile public servant unmarred by modern politics, leaves office with one of the shiniest reputations in America. And with a slate full of lawsuits against Trump allies in his docket before his firing—one investigating the way Fox News handled the sexual assault allegations against Roger Ailes, another reportedly focused on whether Tom Price, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was guilty of insider trading—one could easily write a political narrative that Bharara, a registered Democrat who went after other Democrats, was an unimpeachable victim of a corrupt Trump administration. In other words, he could be the most desirable Democrat in the country right now. (Bharara declined to comment for this article.)
What Bharara does next has already become a popular parlor game in Manhattan, Albany, and the Swamp. Several New York-focused political consultants and elected officials offered a wild array of career paths for the former U.S. attorney, ranging from the plausible (joining a prestigious law firm, sitting on the board of a nonprofit or a corporation) to the baffling (running for governor of New Jersey, his home state, in the upcoming 2018 race to replace Chris Christie). All agreed on one thing: Bharara could write his own ticket. “The Democratic Party needs people like Preet,” Adam Levine, once a senior aide to New York senator Daniel Moynihan, told me. “It’s just a question of, is there the right spot that opens up for him?”
Right now, however, that perfect spot does not exist, even if consultants insist that he has the résumé for it, and carpet-bagging only goes so far for the tri-state area native. Both New York seats in the U.S. Senate are occupied by popular Democrats, Kristen Gillibrand and his former boss, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had initially convinced Trump to let Bharara stay on. (The hard-charging Bharara may not even like the deliberately slow pace of the Senate. “The problem of a guy like that in the Senate is while he has the intellectual component, he’s also a doer,” said Levine.) As for mayor of New York City, nearly everyone I spoke to discounted the possibility that Bharara would run against the wildly unpopular Bill de Blasio, who appears vulnerable in an attempt at re-election. For one, the mayoral election falls later this year, making it all but prohibitively difficult for Bharara, who lives in Westchester County, to declare his residency in the city, pull off a last-minute fundraising blitz, and mount a formidable campaign against the incumbent. But Rodell Molineau, a political consultant and former communications director for the Senate Democrats, believes that even without de Blasio, the mayoralty would never be in Bharara’s future. “If you have real political ambitions, the truism is that no mayor of New York has gone on to a bigger job ever. It’s a cursed thing. You get all the toughness of having a difficult job and difficult politics, you’ve got to raise a lot of money.” Even if he did, there was a simple calculus as well: “Can you beat de Blasio by going to the right of him? It doesn’t strike me that Preet’s the kind of person who can go to the left of him.”
But the one position that could immediately engage Bharara and his new reputation as the alpha Trump resister—and the one that is glaringly unoccupied—is permanently closed off to him. “He’s straight out of central casting” to be a Democratic presidential nominee in 2020, said Levine. “If you and I were sitting around trying to find a candidate to run against Donald Trump, and we had to create one, that’s the candidate who we would create.” Bharara was, unfortunately, born in India, and has the birth certificate to prove it.
Bharara has largely been silent since leaving office, save for the occasional retweet, and according to Molineau, it might be better off for him to remain that way for now. “One of Preet’s characteristics that endears him to so many and has garnered respect is that he has done his job in a very nonpartisan way,” said Molineau. “That’s part of his brand. So jumping into something, especially something that might be seen as overly partisan, I don’t think necessarily that he’s going to go in that realm.”
Levine, however, warned that ducking out of the public sector to become a law firm rainmaker or an independent consultant, even if only to make a few million and call it a day, would be an indicator that Bharara would not enter politics anytime soon. “If you tell me that that’s what he’s considering, that, to me, says that he’s playing a long game, and [the jobs of New York governor, Supreme Court justice, or attorney general], he doesn’t think he can get for the next 10 years.”
For a man who intuitively used the fast-paced news cycle of New York City to his advantage, and who prosecuted hundreds of cases at an alarmingly high speed, 10 years might seem like an eternity. And for a man who has the best résumé for a national public career and has the love of a party in desperate need of national-level talent, it is a tragedy that for the moment, there is nowhere for him to channel that energy.
