Trump Fires U.S. Attorney Who Was Asked To Investigate President’s Foreign Business Deals

New York’s Preet Bharara Refused Administration’s Request To Resign

The Trump administration on Saturday fired a high-profile prosecutor who’d been asked days before to investigate whether the president is violating the U.S. Constitution by receiving payments from foreign countries. 

On Friday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions demanded that 46 U.S. attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama submit their resignations. 

But Preet Bharara, the crusading U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told his section chiefs late Friday that he hadn’t submitted his resignation letter and might instead challenge Sessions to fire him, according to The Daily Beast.

On Saturday morning, several outlets — including CNN — reported that Bharara would indeed refuse Trump’s request, “placing the President in the position of having to fire him in a public standoff.”

Early Saturday afternoon, Bharara reported on Twitter that the standoff had ended: 

Bharara’s firing comes three months after he met with Trump and later reported that the then-president-elect had asked him to stay on. 

According to The New York Times, Bharara is known as “one of the nation’s most aggressive and outspoken prosecutors of public corruption and Wall Street crime.” His jurisdiction included Trump Tower in Manhattan, and his firing comes one week after Trump claimed, without any evidence, that President Barack Obama had wiretapped the building. 

According to BuzzFeed News, watchdog groups wrote to Bharara on Wednesday to ask him to investigate the president to ensure he was not receiving payments or benefits from foreign countries in violation of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

Here’s how Twitter reacted to Saturday’s news.