During a fraught phone call at 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, a tense, nearly 24-hour standoff over the fate of the U.S. attorney in Manhattan came to a head: Preet Bharara was out. 
 
 But was he fired, or did he resign? 
 
 Bharara Tweeted on a personal account that he had been fired. 
 
 But an official familiar with what happened says acting deputy attorney general Dana Boente never said the words "you're fired." 
 
 There is no particular legal or practical difference between being fired or asked to resign, but politically the stakes are enormous. 
 
 Trump administration officials are at pains not to suggest that Preet Bharara, the powerful U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was any different than any of the other U.S. Attorneys asked to resign on Friday. 
 
 But Bharara felt he had a deal, brokered directly with President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions back in a November meeting at Trump Tower. 
 
 And for Bharara, being fired by Trump—who is deeply unpopular among New York Democrats—could be a boost to a political career that many Democrats and Republicans are predicting for the prosecutor. 
 
 "Bharara's decision not to resign if anything will be considered a badge of honor in New York," said Edward Little, a partner at the law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, and a former federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. 
 
 "It's not clear whether he will run for office soon, as he has always been interested in public office or whether he will take a break and join one of the major law firms in the City, any one of which would be thrilled to have him," Little said. 
 
 During Saturday's phone call, an official said Boente told Bharara he needed to submit a letter of resignation. Bharara asked if that meant he was being fired. Boente again said Bharara needed to submit a letter of resignation. Boente said a message Friday to presidentially appointed US attorneys applied to everyone, including including Bharara. After the call, Bharara issued his Tweet saying he had been fired. 
 
 "The White House probably didn't want to fire him outright so as to maintain the appearance of following the custom of replacing most or all of the US Attorneys, who are political appointments," Little said. 
 
 "Bharara's refusal to resign was probably a way of expressing his surprise and dissatisfaction with Trump's reneging on his promise to keep him in office." ||||| President Trump can (and did) make Preet Bharara vacate his office as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York — firing him on Saturday after Bharara refused to resign. But he can't make him go quietly. 
 
 By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like. — Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 12, 2017 
 
 The Moreland Commission was set up by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in July 2013 to investigate corruption in state politics — then abruptly disbanded by Cuomo in March 2014 after, The New York Times reports, "Cuomo had hobbled its work, intervening when it focused on groups with ties to the governor or on issues that might reflect poorly on him." Bharara — who successfully prosecuted more than two dozen New York politicians of both parties for corruption, including the leaders of the state Assembly and state Senate — looked into Cuomo's handling of the Moreland Commission but ultimately concluded there was not enough evidence to prove a federal crime. 
 
 So Bharara's tweet on Sunday suggests that he was fired while he was investigating either Trump or his allies. On Sunday's This Week, House Government Oversight Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) touched on that possibility: 
 
 WATCH: Ranking Oversight Committee Dem @RepCummings says investigations into Trump could have led to @PreetBharara firing. pic.twitter.com/g1VUZkDH4y — This Week (@ThisWeekABC) March 12, 2017 
 
 Without clarification from Bharara, there's only speculation as to what he meant. Bharara had a lot of enemies and critics: on Wall Street, in government, abroad — the leaders of Russia and Turkey had targeted him — and at Fox News, which Bharara was reportedly investigating, along with its former chief, Roger Ailes. The top name floated to replace Bharara is Marc Mukasey, a white-collar defense lawyer who once worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office; he's also the son of former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and a member of Ailes' legal team. 
 
 CNN's Jeffrey Toobin also noted on Saturday night that Bharara "has been involved in a lot of investigations that are at least peripherally related to Donald Trump," apparently including "some investigations that involve the Trump Organization and Russia." The ongoing investigations in Bharara's office are expected to continue with minimal interruption under career prosecutors, at least for now. 
 
 A White House aide criticized Bharara's refusal to resign, telling The Wall Street Journal that all 46 sacked U.S. attorneys were treated in the same way and "45 of the 46 behaved in a manner befitting the office," while "Preet wants everything to be about Preet." Reached for comment, Bharara responded: "It was my understanding that the president himself has said anonymous sources are not to be believed." Peter Weber ||||| After his election in 1968, President Richard Nixon asked Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to resign. Morgenthau refused to leave voluntarily, saying it degraded the office to treat it as a patronage position. 
 
 Nixon’s move precipitated a political crisis. The president named a replacement. Powerful politicians lined up to support Morgenthau. Morgenthau had taken on mobsters and power brokers. He had repeatedly prosecuted Roy Cohn, the sleazy New York lawyer who had been Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man. (One of Cohn’s clients and protégés was a young New York City real-estate developer named Donald Trump.) When Cohn complained that Morgenthau had a vendetta against him, Morgenthau replied, “A man is not immune from prosecution merely because a United States attorney happens not to like him.” 
 
 Morgenthau carried that confrontational attitude to the world of business. He pioneered the Southern District’s approach to corporate crime. When his prosecutors took on corporate fraud, they did not reach settlements that called for fines, the current fashion these days. They filed criminal charges against the executives responsible. 
 
 Before Morgenthau, the Department of Justice focused on two-bit corporate misdeeds — Ponzi schemes and boiler-room operations. Morgenthau changed that. His prosecutors went after CEOs and their enablers — the accountants and lawyers who abetted the frauds or looked the other way. “How do you justify prosecuting a 19-year-old who sells drugs on a street corner when you say it’s too complicated to go after the people who move the money?” he once asked. 
 
 Morgenthau’s years as United States attorney were followed by political success. He was elected New York County district attorney in 1974, the first of seven consecutive terms for that office. 
 
 There are parallels between Morgenthau, and Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District who was fired by President Donald Trump this weekend. 
 
 Like Morgenthau, the 48-year-old Bharara leaves the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District celebrated for taking on corrupt and powerful politicians. Bharara prosecuted two of the infamous “three men in a room” who ran New York state: Sheldon Silver, the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, and Dean Skelos, the Republican Senate majority leader. 
 
 He won convictions of a startling array of local politicians, carrying on the work of the Moreland Commission, an ethics inquiry created and then dismissed by New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (This weekend, Bharara cryptically tweeted that “I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like,” a suggestion that he was fired as he was pursuing cases pointed at Trump or his allies.) 
 
 But the record shows that Bharara was much less aggressive when it came to confronting Wall Street’s misdeeds. 
 
 President Obama appointed Bharara in 2009, amid the wreckage of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He inherited ongoing investigations into the collapse, including a probe against Lehman Brothers. 
 
 He also inherited something he and his young charges found more alluring: insider-trading cases against hedge fund managers. His office focused obsessively on those. At one point, the Southern District racked up a record of 85-0 in those cases. (Appeals courts would later throw out two prominent convictions, infuriating him and dealing blows to several other cases.) 
 
 Hedge funds are safer targets. The firms aren’t enmeshed in the global financial markets in the way that giant banks are. Insider trading cases are relatively easy to win and don’t address systemic abuses that helped bring down the financial system. 
 
 Even there his record was more mixed than is popularly understood. As Sheelah Kolhatkar demonstrates in her propulsive and riveting “Black Edge,” when it came to bringing his biggest whale to justice, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital, the Southern District blinked. They did not charge him, only securing a guilty plea from his firm. 
 
 Present and former prosecutors say Bharara did not give much emphasis to investigations arising from the financial meltdown, an approach shared by his boss, former Attorney General Eric Holder. Justice Department insiders say many of those inquiries withered not because they were unpromising, but because they had little support. 
 
 Bharara missed an opportunity by not bringing any significant criminal charges against individuals in the wake of the collapses of Lehman, investment bank Merrill Lynch, the insurer AIG, the mortgage securities and collateralized debt obligation businesses, or the myriad public misrepresentations from bank CEOs about their finances. 
 
 Bharara and senior officials in Washington argue that there were no criminal cases to file after the 2008 crisis. But the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan did pursue significant civil cases against the banks for their mortgage activities, cases that had to prove misconduct by the “preponderance of the evidence.” And DOJ did win guilty pleas from the banks themselves, an indication that prosecutors might have been able to charge individuals for their part in crimes their institutions had acknowledged. Academics who studied those years, including Columbia’s Tomasz Piskorski and James Witkin and University of Chicago’s Amit Seru found widespread patterns of fraud in the mortgage business. 
 
 The exception makes this failure all the more puzzling. As I detailed in 2014, Bharara’s office brought one case for misconduct during the financial crisis — against a mid-level banker. Prosecutors charged Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse with overseeing traders who knowingly misrepresented the value of mortgage securities. Serageldin pleaded guilty and went to prison. 
 
 Serageldin’s colleagues in the industry and others familiar with Credit Suisse found it hard to believe that he was the only person involved in that particular fraud. 
 
 Bharara’s reluctance to pursue senior executives was seen in other investigations of big banks. His office wrested a $1.7 billion fine from JPMorgan Chase over its complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, but it brought no charges against individual bankers. 
 
 One odd aspect of his tenure was the Southern District’s willingness to defer to other jurisdictions when it came to Wall Street cases. 
 
 Historically, the SDNY has been the leading enforcers of securities laws, nicknamed the “sovereign district” for its propensity to grab corporate fraud cases from elsewhere on the flimsiest of jurisdictional pretexts. Under Bharara, the Southern District let other U.S. attorneys claim investigations into residential mortgage-backed securities, the instruments at the heart of the financial crisis. Those other offices were not nearly as versed in complex financial cases as their colleagues in Manhattan. In addition, Bharara’s office ceded post-financial crisis investigations into foreign exchange and global interest rate manipulation to prosecutors working from the Justice Department’s headquarters. 
 
 Like Morgenthau, Bharara was a prominent figure in the New York landscape, given to well-orchestrated press conferences and memorable sound bites. Like Morgenthau, he did not leave office quietly, even though the president has a longstanding right to name his own U.S. attorneys. And like Morgenthau, he may try to parlay his martyrdom into elective office. 
 
 But if he runs on his record of convictions, as prosecutors often do, voters might want to consider as well the list of possible targets he never pursued. ||||| Updated! Scroll down for news that Preet Bharara has been fired. 
 
 From The New York Times comes this tale of governmental insubordination: 
 
 Preet Bharara, the Manhattan federal prosecutor who was told to submit his resignation along with 45 others on Friday, has no plans to do so — forcing a potential showdown with President Trump and the Department of Justice [DOJ]. Mr. Bharara, whose office is overseeing a case against a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and an investigation into people close to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, has told several people that he did not hand in a resignation on Friday, as he was ordered to do by the acting deputy attorney general, Dana Boente. He also does not intend to do so over the weekend, he said in conversations with associates, a move that could force the hand of the Trump administration. 
 
 I'm sure Bharara has his reasons but color me unimpressed. Bharara is a classic federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, always looking to make headlines as much as meaningful collars. He earned the enmity of Reason readers in 2015 when his office subpoenaed information about 
 
 the records of six people who left hyperbolic comments at the website about the federal judge who oversaw the controversial conviction of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Shortly after the subpoena was issued, the government issued a gag order prohibiting Reason not only from discussing the matter but even acknowledging the existence of the subpoena or the gag order itself. As a wide variety of media outlets have noted, such actions on the part of the government are not only fundamentally misguided and misdirected, they have a tangible chilling effect on free expression by commenters and publications alike.... The subpoena also covered...harmless comments as: "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman," and "I'd prefer a hellish place on Earth be reserved for her as well." 
 
 As Katherine Mangu-Ward noted last fall, it's true that the Trump administration asked Bharara to stay on for a while. But that was then and this is now. And there's something truly disturbing about a DOJ appointee who refuses to take a powder when asked, especially when there's no larger question about executive-power overreach. 
 
 What is it that Barack Obama used to say? "Elections have consequences." Presidents get to staff this level of service the way they want to. I don't expect Donald Trump to be a champion of free speech, but removing Bharara from office is a small step in that direction. 
 
 Updated (2:40 P.M.): It was nice knowing you, Preet Bharara! ||||| When President Donald Trump Friday asked for resignation letters from 46 U.S. attorneys, attention focused on just one of them: Preet Bharara, the country’s most feared and revered prosecutor and the inspiration for the hit show Billions. 
 
 It’s normal for new presidents to axe the previous administration’s appointees, but then President-elect Trump had told Bharara in November he’d stay on the job, an announcement cheered by Democrats and Republicans alike and seen as a sign that the new boss might govern more moderately than he had campaigned, making decisions based on merit and wisdom rather than ideology and brute partisanship. 
 
 Psych. 
 
 Trump’s stunning reversal, which came without explanation, was a blow to the nation and a gut punch to New York. 
 
 Without question, Bharara pushed the envelope with the scope and tactics of his prosecutions, but he largely avoided criticism from the press and the public because of the evenhandedness with which he pursued wrongdoing. In no area was this impartiality clearer than in his takedowns of dirty New York politicians. 
 
 Less than two weeks apart, Bharara secured the convictions of both the Democratic leader of New York’s State Assembly and the Republican leader of its Senate. Before Bharara had trained his sights on Albany, New York’s capital had degenerated into an orgy of graft and cronyism. 
 
 He wasn’t done. Bharara has already indicted one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s closest aides as part of an ongoing investigation, and just three weeks ago his office had questioned Bill de Blasio in a long-running probe into pay-for-play questions about the mayor and his administration. 
 
 While these investigations will not likely evaporate under Bharara’s successor, it’s a near certainty that Cuomo and de Blasio slept more peacefully Friday night than they had in some time. 
 
 Why would Trump potentially derail investigations into de Blasio, who is currently campaigning for reelection on a platform of opposing him, and Cuomo, who has been stoking rumors that he’ll seek the Democratic nomination for President in 2020? 
 
 We don’t have an answer yet, but we know New Yorkers have lost one of their greatest public servants at a time when we desperately need him. 
 
 It must weigh heavily upon Bharara not being able to see his investigations through to the end. Asked to resign, he refused. So on Saturday he was fired. 
 
 The following day, he tweeted, “By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like,” a lacerating reference to the blue-ribbon commission Cuomo had appointed in 2013 to probe Albany corruption and then abruptly shut down when it bucked Cuomo’s control and proved too adept at following its assignment. Bharara then subpoenaed its records, and began a fearless dive into the pits of New York corruption that continued until this weekend. 
 
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 For years there’s been chatter that Bharara’s next act would be as a candidate, but no reason to take this scuttlebutt seriously as long as Bharara was at his self-professed dream job. 
 
 Now he’s had that yanked away. And when he sees the culture of corruption in New York, he’ll have to grit his teeth and bear it like everyone else. Or not. 
 
 Fortunately, there is something Bharara, a Democrat, can do to complete his work and open a great new chapter in his storied career: run for governor next year against Cuomo. 
 
 A Bharara win would bring both a literal and symbolic end to a disgraceful era of New York politics. He would also be in one of the most potent positions in the country to oppose the Trump administration’s overreach. And, of course, getting fired by Trump amounts to an endorsement for the Democratic voters here who would decide that race. 
 
 The Democratic Party desperately needs new leaders of true integrity, and so too does the nation. Today, Preet Bharara is unemployed. Stay tuned. ||||| Photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters 
 
 Throughout his six-decade career working on three continents, Rupert Murdoch has used his media properties to advance the prospects of politicians whose policies help his business interests. Whether it was Margaret Thatcher’s union-busting in the 1980s or Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to put Fox News on Time Warner’s cable system in the 1990s, Murdoch went all-out for leaders who allowed him to protect and expand his corporate empire. 
 
 Since Election Day, Murdoch, now the executive chairman of Fox News, has personally nudged the network in a more pro-Trump direction, sources tell me. That effort included anointing Trump-friendly Tucker Carlson as the successor to Megyn Kelly as host in the 9 p.m. slot. Fox News staffers are also grumbling that segments now have to fit a “pro-Trump narrative,” one insider told me. Trump seems to be returning the goodwill: He asked Murdoch to submit names for FCC commissioner and tweeted praise for Fox News. He’s even taken policy ideas from the network. Now Murdoch may be poised to reap a much bigger win from a Trump administration action. 
 
 
 
 That’s because on Saturday Trump oversaw the firing of Preet Bharara, the U.S attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan, whose office is in the middle of a high-profile federal investigation of Fox News. The probe, according to sources, is looking at a number of potential crimes, including whether Fox News executives broke laws by allegedly obtaining journalists’ phone records or committed mail and wire fraud by hiding financial settlements paid to women who accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment. Sources told me that prosecutors have been offering witnesses immunity to testify before a federal grand jury that’s already been impaneled. 
 
 
 
 Trump’s decision to fire Bharara ignited speculation that it was designed to blunt investigations like the Fox News probe. In November, Trump had promised Bharara he could remain in the job. But on Friday, he reversed course and requested Bharara’s resignation along with 45 other Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys. (Adding to the intrigue, Trump’s prosecutor purge came less than 24 hours after Sean Hannity said on Fox News that Trump should “purge” the Justice Department of Obama-appointed officials.) 
 
 Given that Fox News is Murdoch’s most profitable division, the prospect of indictments is a serious problem. “They’re really worried,” one source close to the network said. Another insider said that Fox News executives considered the investigation “political” because Bharara had been appointed by Barack Obama. Which is why, for Murdoch, it must be a relief that Bharara’s replacement could be an ally. According to the Times, Trump’s short list to replace Bharara includes Marc Mukasey — who just happens to be former Fox News chief Roger Ailes’s personal lawyer. 
 
 Considering Mukasey’s close relationship with Ailes, he would surely come under pressure to recuse himself from the Fox News probe if he were appointed by Trump to succeed Bharara. “I have no comment,” Mukasey said when I reached him on Sunday evening and asked if he planned to do so, should he get the job.
– Preet Bharara, the newly fired US attorney in Manhattan, has a brand-new Twitter account, an ax to grind, and lots of free time on his hands. Bharara was one of 46 federal attorneys ordered to resign late last week by the Justice Department, though he says he refused to do so and was fired instead. A look at coverage: Expect lots of chatter about a run for office. The 48-year-old has previously said he's not interested, but this run-in with the White House might mean that "his political star is rising," reports the New York Times in a story that takes a broad look at his career. He's out of his job, but there's some disagreement on whether he was technically fired, as CNBC explains. Bharara has the reputation of being an aggressive prosecutor willing to take on big names, but ProPublica points to what it sees as a glaring exception: He brought no cases against top Wall Street execs in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. Read the assessment here. "By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like." That tweet from Bharara, referring to a political corruption investigation that was shut down in New York, is drawing attention. Is he suggesting he got fired because he was investigating the White House? The Week takes a look. One person who is probably pretty happy that Bharara is gone? Rupert Murdoch. As New York explains, Bharara's office is investigating Fox News. Among other things, the network allegedly hid financial statements related to sexual harassment settlements. For a sense of the competing views about Bharara, see this critical post at the libertarian Reason about his "overreaching" prosecutions, and this one at the Daily Beast that hopes he runs for governor in New York.