YouSaid · the spoken record

Preet Bharara

lines on the record: 147
first: 2019-05-15
most recent: 2019-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And he said that he thinks the structures and the institutions of America are very strong. I think the same thing. And I think they've resisted this bad stuff pretty well. And I think it'll be okay. He said, but I reserve the right to re-evaluate my opinion if Donald Trump gets re-elected. And that's what I think is true. That I think one term with all these attacks on institutions and on norms and on democracy and the kind of rhetoric that's being used and the anti-immigrant, I'm an immigrant, proud immigrant born in India. I think you can recover from that much more quickly and fully than you can if America decides to re-elect this person, then you have eight years. And imagine what the second four years it's going to look like, then I'm really worried”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, America is still really great I keep quoting from someone I had on my podcast Very intelligent, sounded more intelligent because he had an English accent.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And nothing required doing that, and they were lying about it, and they were saying it's not a policy, even though it was a policy. And Jeff Session said a lot of terrible things about it. You know what? It's not fixed in a lot of these families have not been reunited. But they had to retreat from the policy. You know why? Not just because of lawyers, because people got really angry about it and they demonstrated about it. And they showed political force. And the president never retreats from anything. And this was some retreat that shows you the power that people can have to undo bad things that are happening. That to me is the biggest takeaway.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, I think it takes good people to not get inured to all the bad stuff going on, who stand up for the right thing, whether it's journalists or lawyers or directors of the FBI or regular citizens who call stuff out. Look, one of the worst things I think this administration has done was this completely absurd brazen policy with no exceptions of separating kids from their parents at the border.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm not for crime. Are you trying to get me? Just a little sci-fi for you. I think, weren't there like they had to have three ladies soaking in milk?”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of policing. No, we're done with that. I think people have to be very careful about AI. These are conversations that are happening at the cutting edge of law enforcement now. You can have bias built in. But at the same time, again, just being very, very generally. Bias in human beings too. And so it's this constant tension between trying to figure out the way in the law and in justice issues generally, figuring out how to do the right thing that doesn't have bias in it, what's going to have less bias, like the human beings at the LAPD Or, you know, this algorithm that you program into your surveillance cameras or other ways that you try to sift through all the visas and passports of people who are coming into the country to figure out who's more likely to be problematic and who's not.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's lots of things they'll be able to do and they'll be able to assist. Yes. The creative. But if justice will continue Well, no, but police surveillance a lot of policing is being done through AR, which I think has to stop because the data is so dirty.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like to think that you're still not going to get my knots. Okay, listen to me, you're not going to get a computer to argue in front of a jury. Yes, there's lots of things they'll be able to do and they'll be able to assist. Yes. The creative. If justice will continue to be done by flesh and blood human beings.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, yes, yeah, there are a lot of ways, just like in all sorts of other sectors If you had people who weren't doing their job properly and were charging you an arm and a leg to do something that a computer can do, then yeah, I mean, tax preparers. I was just thinking the other day, I was making travel plans. Remember the old days? Yeah.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The person who was the acting attorney general when Bill Barr was nominated was a guy by the name of Matt Whitaker. Yeah. Oh”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think he had a good one to start with. In the circles he did. Maybe his legal circles were for crap. New people allow a lot.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but you can, some people call it spying. The attorney general calls it spying when it's court authorized. What about horses as he is? Anyway, move along. I can't even look at him anymore. He's just.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is pattern matching. You could search words. I'll tell you another way in which tech has changed the law. And I tried to be a pioneer of this in my own office. Is you have so much data in the old days lawyers would sit down with boxes and boxes and boxes of documents. And it was very difficult to figure out the flow of money. It was very difficult to figure out the flow of communications. The availability of technology to help you sort through enormous amounts. And we were one of the first companies that paired with a tech company in the whole justice department to try to help us understand the data that we have. Yeah. And you can do massive amount of things. You can figure out in some ways, depending on the data you have, to worry about privacy concerns there too.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To hold an institution criminally liable, it just is, and it probably is a good thing that it should be difficult in the same way it's difficult to hold an individual criminally liable because you want the standard to be high because you don't want prosecutors to be abusing their power and saying like anybody I want I can throw in jail or anybody I want I can prosecute so the standard should be high and the guidelines for prosecuting companies Is very high in the Justice Department because you could bring the economy to a standstill. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be, and it depends on what the facts are.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't give advisory judgments. I'm sort of like Bob Mueller in that way on obstruction. But you would take a look at these things. Look, it is a very difficult thing.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out. No, there are So among the problems you have is size. And you and I were talking right before the show about this piece by Chris Hughes, one of the founders, co founders of Facebook. Yeah, look, I think there's an argument to be made. I haven't examined the Sherman Act for this purpose”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the Russian. And yeah, and corrupting elections and doing all sorts. So it's like anything else. It's like a Twilight Zone episode. You get this gift that seems so wonderful and perfect and amazing. Oh, wow. It's like got a lot of bad things going on. So I think you need to have will on the part of people in Congress and an education on the part of people in Congress.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That rather than have this sort of pro freedom, pro-democracy, pro-good debate result, you have the opposite. You have hate-mongering and toxicity and the shutting down of voices and the riot.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were considered the wave of the future. And to be a person in Congress or somewhere else who said, you know, we need to tie them down, whether it's Amazon or anyone else. I know Amazon is a different kind of thing. But we need to let these platforms live and grow. And the expectation was that these would be great engines for democracy and communication and freedom. That would know no national boundaries. And if you were an oppressed person in some other country, this was a way You to bring democracy and justice to your people in your country. So, who's going to tamp that down? And then all of a sudden you take a nap or you sneeze. And they have these huge monopolistic power, yeah. And also, and then the counter to that happened in a way that I think was maybe predictable to smart people like you, but not predictable to other people.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I worked in the center for four and a half years, and there was a lot of discussion about updating. The laws to take into account new technology, both in the law enforcement area to combat the cyber threat and also in this way that you just talked about. And there's not a lot of appetite to do it. A, because there's not a lot of expertise. And B, it's kind of like a lose-lose proposition. There are people who think on the one hand, privacy is really important. On the other hand, And maybe this is changing in the last couple of years, but a few years ago, these were sort of untouchable businesses because they were hot, they were cutting edge.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I would study up much more than I had for this question. You know, there's emails on your podcast. Yeah, look,”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's zero. Yeah, the tax jurisdiction, whatever it is. Came and went. Yeah. It did win the Pulitzer Prize, but it did. You're right, 100%. Although I'm going to keep it going with like, oh, that tech company lost half a Trump or something like that. That's what I'm going to do. So let's finish up talking about the tech companies. Where they're going is right now there's questions of the FDC is going to hold Facebook in contempt, I guess, a version of incontempt or responsible for this. Mark Zuckerberg responsible. Personally liable for some of the things they're doing when you look at the tech industry, it's ripe for regulation, fines, legal action. They have been protected because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They have immunity. What's next from your perspective?”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From morning to afternoon. The New York Times, it's great, Susan Craig is a great reporter, and she's had a couple of big scoops. President lost a billion dollars The likelihood that anyone is going to be talking about that on Friday. He's zero. Yeah, the tax story, whatever it is, came and went.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's because it's a different kind of process. But it's also been, I do think social media has to do with everyone knew everything. And the press, the stories that were amplified by social media and then amplified by cable and then amplified again on cable, it just creates this no but nothing.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's an argument that it sort of saved him because there's nothing new. And things like impeachment need momentum, need oxygen, and need new stuff. Now, imagine if in my office, when I was the U.S. attorney. That there had been a drip because somebody had been leaking a defense lawyer, been telling the press about stuff. And so every allegation that we're making about figure X. Was kind of known in the press. And on the eve of the indictment, I called my team. I was like, guys, it makes no sense to indict this guy because the public already knows. No, of course not. You would indict. You proceed to a court of law. It's kind of bizarre.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot there, but I think this is the irony of sort of expectations and how political investigations Or investigations done by people like in Congress are so different from how normal prosecutors do it. One of the interesting things about the whole Mueller report is, you know, do the thought experiment that some people have suggested and think to yourself, imagine you didn't know anything in it Until the day it was published. Or imagine even like half of it. Imagine you didn't know about the Trump Tower meeting, even on the collusion conspiracy stuff. And all of a sudden, one day there's this report that lays all this out”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. I think it was difficult because they were hoping for a slam dunk. The Democrats were certainly hoping for more of a slam dunk in order to, although there's plenty there. It seems like there's plenty. There's a lot there.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if Don McGann doesn't want to come testify, it's easier for that to be accomplished because that's the status quo. I think that the default position for Bob Muller is to be responsive to a subpoena and come in. So I think that the president and his team will have to make some argument in court to prevent him from coming to testify. But I think that the likelihood is that Bob Moore is going to be, you know, I know what the constraints are. I'm not going to talk about classified information. I did this for two years. I don't think he's dying to testify. He's not a talkative guy. Nobody, unless you knew him from before two years ago, knows what his voice sounds like. But he's not going to evade. He's not going to skip out. He'll come.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in legal battles, it depends on what the status quo is, right? So if you want to get a document from somebody and they have the document, to get the document is difficult because the status quo is you don't have the document.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Mueller's harder to prevent coming to testify because Mueller is not a scaredy cat. And I think Mueller will come. The question is what strictures will there be on him with respect to classified information? Can they actually prevent him?”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People like that don't want to look like they're dying to come testify because it doesn't help him. In certain Republican circles, I bet. So he's just going to sit tight and let other folks work it out. But as we've said, that can take a long time.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I guess Don McGann is taking the position. I'm not going to get into a fight between mom and dad. You know, Congress and the White House. And I'm just going to maintain the status quo. It's not a terrible tactical position for him to be in. A guy like him wants to be forced to do the thing he's going to do. My guess is he's probably okay with testifying. He was okay with talking to Bob Mueller for 30 hours.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, those are crisis points, I think. And there are a lot of those. But now you have a House of Representatives that's led by the opposing party, and they have responsibilities to do oversight, and they're not being responded to in the way that they want. We've seen that before. I think this is worse because I think you have a more intransigent president. You have him saying things not like, you know, we're going to take a look and see which things will respond to which things not. The president, at least, has taken an extreme position, basically saying like enough. And Mitch McConnell says case closed, and Donald Trump says, essentially, I think he's given marching orders to folks to oppose everything. And that's not right.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. And yeah, you know, I don't look, I think that we have been in some kind of crisis mode for a long time that predates the non-responsiveness to subpoenas from Congress. When the president takes the word of Vladimir Putin over his law enforcement agencies as Intel communities, that's a crisis. When you have the president doing all sorts of things where he denigrates particular judges by name. Where he says that the mainstream media, and he's, you know, he's Occasion dropped the sort of caveat of fake news, whatever that means the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, yeah.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very unsatisfying. I'll ask you one more and then we're going to get to take this just now, Nancy Pulsey just declared we're in a constitutional crisis. Now, you're not a constitutional lawyer, but it's clear.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These other bank records don't solve the question because we see this yet another set of monies coming into this other bank account. Now we have to subpoena that stuff. A long winded way of saying you don't know what the twists and turns are of the case. You learn that after the fact. Sometimes things can happen very quickly. Sometimes it takes a very, very long time. And sometimes they lead to something. Sometimes they don't. How's that for an unsatisfying answer?”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think we can do it very quickly. And then you think, okay, well, what's going to happen soon? And then they come back again and say, well, you know, we're kind of wrong about this. But now we've gotten these other bank records.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we prosecuted in New York, the leader of the New York State Assembly, and the leader of the New York State Senate, one a Democrat, one a Republican. And I described some of this in the book, there were times during those two long parallel investigations, separate cases, but they were done in parallel, where the prosecutors would come into my office and say, well, how's it looking? And they're like, you know, I'm not sure. Going to amount to anything. And then a couple of months go by, and they follow up on some other leads, and they would say, oh my God, we really, I think, are going to have it. I think we can sketch out this scheme.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, I don't know. And in some ways, it's important to believe that they don't know If you know at the outset of a case when you're going to be done, then that suggests that you prejudged it in some way.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, it means that people used to ask me, when do you think Mueller is going to be done? Or when you think the Southern District is going to be done, you know, after they did the search of Michael Cohen's apartment in his hotel and his safety deposit box”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Trump organization, but how the Trump folks deal with institutions that they're responsible for and that they manage.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pursue. And with respect to those cases, people can't be pardoned. So that's something significant as well. And the New York State Attorney General has been working on this Trump Foundation case. It's not criminal, but that shed a lot of light on how the Trump organization, not the Trump organization.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, is it possible that an Attorney General on the eve of the Southern District wanting to hand down a particular indictment of someone close to the president, would he reach in having been briefed about it and say, no, you cannot do that? I suppose that's a really, really big deal. That's a really hard thing to pull off. And I think it's a really hard thing to pull off quietly.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they're going to continue to do their work. I don't know, I don't have any insight information, but I hired a lot of those people who were in that office. I don't know what their political affiliations were. You don't look at them. You're not supposed to look at them. It's improper to look at them. And they just go by the facts of law. When I was the U.S. attorney, we prosecuted Democrats and Republicans. It didn't matter how powerful you were. It didn't matter what your political affiliation was. If you committed a crime and it was in the interest of justice to pursue it and to prosecute you, we did, and I presume they will do the same”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Department of Justice is supposed to be independent, supposed to be at arm's length, and the most the area where they're supposed to be the most independent is on particular enforcement matters. And even on those enforcement matters, where there's supposed to be even more, more in a more independent to the extent that you can be a superlative of independent. Have to be in cases that are politically sensitive. And cannot be directed by a political officer, whether it's the president or anyone else, who to prosecute, who not to prosecute.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you already played. Why are you spending $6 million to try to get your kid into a school? But they do And I've seen defense lawyers make these arguments in court unsuccessfully for decades. But why not?”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why would he cheat? Why would he get inside trading? I don't know, but he did right. They do it all the time. I don't know why multimillionaire actresses sometimes shoplift.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until you infect the courts. Yeah, I guess that's true. But character assassination and lies and total irrelevancies, they don't work in court. And there's a decision maker at the end of the day. Look, I've often thought to myself that some of these things that people have said on behalf of Donald Trumpy. For you, that's what I'm assuming, yeah, right? You know, Donald Trump, people say on behalf of Donald Trump, well, I didn't have to have someone else fire by mullet because I had the ability to fire by Mueller, so it doesn't make any sense.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's the exact difference that I was talking about earlier with the clowns. In a court of law, that doesn't fly. Because you have a judge who's going to say, okay, Mr. Limbau. That's nonsense. Move on to your next argument, and you have a decision maker. That's why all this stuff doesn't work in court.”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you have people like Rush Limbaugh. The next day, after having said all this crap about predicting who this guy was is clearly going to be a left-wing person. Saying, well, you know what? Maybe those decals were put there by someone else. Yeah. It seems odd”
2019-05-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Preet Bharara · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT