# Preet Bharara Indian-born American lawyer who served eight years as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (2009–2017) — the "Sovereign District" — where The New Yorker called him "one of the most consequential prosecutors in American history." His March 2017 firing by [[Donald Trump]], after Trump had personally asked him to stay on and then placed a series of norm-breaking direct phone calls to him, was one of the first-term's earliest rule-of-law warning shots. He has since become a central figure of the prosecutor commentariat: former federal prosecutors who translate legal proceedings against and around Trump for a mass audience. ## SDNY record A former chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Schumer on the Senate Judiciary Committee (where he led the investigation into the 2006 Bush-era U.S. Attorney firings — an eerie preview of his own), Bharara ran an office of 200+ prosecutors whose signature campaigns cut across party and sector: public corruption in Albany (convictions of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican), the insider-trading crackdown (Raj Rajaratnam; SAC Capital's $1.8B guilty plea), and terrorism cases including Faisal Shahzad, Sulaiman Abu Ghayth, Abu Hamza, and arms trafficker Viktor Bout. ## After the firing Bharara refused Trump's blanket demand that Obama-era U.S. Attorneys resign and forced the administration to fire him — a deliberate paper-trail move. He then built the CAFE media operation: *Stay Tuned with Preet* (2017–present) and *CAFE Insider*, which he co-hosts with [[Joyce Vance]]; CAFE was acquired by [[Vox Media]] in 2021, whose podcast network now sits under [[Lupa Systems]] following the [[James Murdoch Lupa NY Mag Vox Acquisition]] — making Bharara part of the counter-pole media landscape the Resistance Hub tracks. He is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU Law, author of the bestseller *Doing Justice* (2019), and since 2022 a partner at WilmerHale. With Christine Todd Whitman he co-chaired the [[Brennan Center for Justice]]'s National Task Force on Rule of Law & Democracy, a bipartisan project on protecting DOJ independence — the exact terrain of the current weaponization fight mapped in the [[Federal Prosecutors Hub]]. ## See also - [[Joyce Vance]] — CAFE Insider co-host and fellow fired-cohort U.S. Attorney - [[Federal Prosecutors Hub]] — the charging-power layer his commentary decodes - [[Jurists and Legal Advocates]] · [[Resistance Hub]]