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Joon Kim attends an event for the Asian American Bar Association. May 30, 2017. (Photo: David Handschuh/NYLJ)[/caption] Joon Kim, who became acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York after Preet Bharara’s firing last year, returned to Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton on Monday as a partner. Kim, 46, is joining Cleary for the fourth time, after having worked at the law firm as a summer associate, associate and partner, with stints in government in between. He left the Southern District office in January. With Kim as acting U.S. attorney, the office took on trials of Turkish banker Mehmet Hakan Atilla, sports gambler Billy Walters and “Chelsea bomber” Ahmad Rahimi. He and and other prosecutors prepared for trials in high-profile public corruption cases, including Joseph Percoco, a former adviser to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the retrials of Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York Assembly, and Dean Skelos, a former Republic State Senate majority leader. Kim became acting U.S. attorney in March 2017, after President Donald Trump fired Bharara, who had refused to quit after the president initially asked him to stay on. “The circumstances” of Bharara’s departure “were unusual and in many ways challenging,” Kim said in an interview Monday. “It was personally sad for me to see his term as U.S. attorney sort of end in that way, but I recognize that as the acting U.S. attorney I needed to ensure the office’s work continued.” “It was a priority of mine to ensure that people it the office understood that the great work of the assistant U.S. attorneys was going to continue unabated and interrupted,” he said. “The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has a lot of independence and we were able to continue that level of independence,” Kim said. He declined to comment on whether he saw interference from the Trump administration on government work outside the Southern District. He also declined to comment on whether he had any disagreements or differences with the Justice Department while running the office. Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has sought more resources to combat the opioid epidemic and to crack down on illegal immigration. But Kim said the Southern District office’s work “largely continued in a very similar manger” after the change in administration. “Obviously there are some shifts in priority that can occur,” he said, but he added he didn’t observe a significant shift in the office's priorities during his term. Overall, he said his work as acting U.S. attorney was “incredibly rewarding and humbling experience.” “I expect and hope that the office’s work continues in the finest traditions, and from what I can see today, it appears to be doing so,” Kim said, when asked about the current Southern District U.S. attorney, Geoffrey Berman, a former Greenberg Traurig partner. Kim said he still keeps in touch with Bharara, whom he's known since 2000. “We were colleagues and we’re friends,” he said. “I found him to be a great leader of a storied office, and I enjoyed working with him and it was a privilege to serve in the office while he was the U.S. attorney,” he said. After Bharara's exit, he said, “I was impressed with the way the AUSAs continued to do their job well and continued to be incredibly active and productive, and I think the work itself keeps the morale of the office up and it did." Kim is rejoining Cleary's New York office as a partner in its enforcement and litigation group.