Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, here's a timely one. Former United

States Attorney, Preet Bharara. When I went to meet with Barrar last week in his office at NYU Law

School, just off Washington Square Park, I figured he'd be a good person to get a

read on the Mueller Special Counsel Investigation. He is, after all, a man who spent eight years running one of the

biggest and most active public corruption operations in the country when he was on the job as U.S.

Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is an office traditionally known for

ambitious prosecutions run by big personalities.

Barrara is very much in that line. And if you didn't know him from following what he'd

been doing in New York, then you probably know him now from his initial strange bedfellows

relationship with Trump to then getting thrown out along with the other Obama appointed

U.S. attorneys in March. Or maybe you know him from his new podcast.

Yes, I had another podcast host on.

It's called Stay Tuned with Preet, which is worth a listen to.

Start out with the first episode in which he goes through his encounters with Trump from last November through March.

He did that enough there that had decided not to repeat it in our conversation.

But we did touch on some of the details he skipped over,

including what his phone conversations with Trump were like during the transition, and why he

says they threw him off so much. I've known prete myself since 2010 back when I was covering New York

politics. He was new in the job as U.S. attorney, but I could already tell that he was going to be

a real factor in politics since he had started taking down politicians and staffers at a surprisingly

fast clip. So I wrote what I believe actually was the first big profile of him at the end of

2010. As you'll hear me say to him, part of what made me think it was time to move on from the

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