Matt and Katie discuss the latest on the debate over Covid stimulus negotiations, NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller talks academic freedom.
Preet Bharara Reads Bob Mueller’s Tea Leaves
A former top prosecutor gives his informed take on the special counsel’s investigation.
.. “I don’t talk about the things we were examining and investigating during that time I was U.S. attorney, including on the day that I left that job,” Bharara told me, in a separate interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “But there would be people who would know what we were looking at, including the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, because we provided summaries of significant and sensitive cases that we were working. And that’s all I’ll say.”.. he thinks Trump enabled an environment of people busting through norms and boundaries, and looking out for themselves above all. He’s also happy to talk about the reaction he had to the meeting and two phone calls he had with the then-president-elect last fall and winter... “This is a person who is a transactional player in the world—that’s how he did what he did in his business, and that’s how he thinks, I think, the justice system is supposed to work. And why not have people on your side, because like the Godfather says, the Godfather may come to you for a favor,”.. Deeply political people, whether you’re talking about a governor of a state or a chief of staff to a president, think that everyone acts like they do.”.. in his new office in Vanderbilt Hall at NYU School of Law, where the student lounge is named after presidential in-laws Seryl and Charles Kushner—whose big donations to the school coincided with their son Jared Kushner’s time getting a JD/MBA there.