For the second year in a row, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern DIstrict of New York, Preet Bharara, attended the Vanity Fair Oscars party. (The New York Post has the 2015 news; the New York Times reported the 2014 news.) In 2014, Mr. Bharara had explained his attendance by saying that an Oscar-nominated movie was based on one of his office's cases. I've seen no explanation yet for this year's appearance. It certainly makes it possible for people to interpret Mr. Bharara's prosecutorial zeal against so-called insider traders as somehow associated with the political opinions of the Vanity Fair editor, Graydon Carter, who wrote, "the disconnect between the country's richest and its most downtrodden is looking very much the way it did during the first Gilded Age, in the late 1800s...Like grubs, slugs, and moles, Goldman prefers to work in the dark."
When George W. Bush tried to install his own U.S. attorneys, as the Constitution allows him to do, Senator Schumer, then aided by Mr. Bharara, was all up in arms about the supposed scandal of the politicization of the Justice Department. But when Mr. Bharara is the prosecutor partying late at night with Hollywood stars and a left-wing editor while bringing cases that advance the Obama agenda of fighting income inequality, somehow no one complains about the politics.
