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It now appears that the administration may have screwed the pooch in the most exquisite way possible—by assuming that everyone they’ve brought into the government is as unprincipled and slavishly loyal as, say, every Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. This has put the entire Department of Justice into a jackpot over New York mayor Eric Adams and given the administration a media-scandal spectacular that it can’t lie its way out of. From The New York Times:
Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments. The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.
See how easy it is to make this administration look foolish in public? See how easy it is to cut the political legs out from under it based on its utter lack of ethics? The stench of this one is going to linger.
The prime hero in this saga is Danielle Sassoon, the Federalist Society member and former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia whom the administration installed as the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most important federal prosecution posts in the country. Sassoon resigned rather than follow an order from acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove to drop the prosecution against Adams for public corruption. Bove then tried to kick the decision over to the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, only to have the top two officials in that unit—Kevin Driscoll and John Keller—resign rather than carry out Bove’s instructions.
The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political; Mr. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.
And Sassoon did not go quietly. She sent a letter explaining her resignation to putative attorney general Pam Bondi in which she explained her refusal to honor Bove’s attempt to ratfck the Adams case. In it, she explained in quite stark terms that the current president is running an administration that can be bribed with mere sycophancy.
The reasons advanced by Mr. Bove for dismissing the indictment are not ones I can in good faith defend as in the public interest and as consistent with the principles of impartiality and fairness that guide my decision-making. ¶ First, Mr. Bove proposes dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws, analogizing to the prisoner exchange in which the United States freed notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Bout in return for an American prisoner in Russia. Such an exchange with Adams violates commonsense beliefs in the equal administration of justice, the Justice Manual, and the Rules of Professional Conduct…. Adams has argued in substance—and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede—that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration’s policy priorities.
At which point, Sassoon dropped some legal Latin that landed on Bove’s head like a 500-pound bag of dung.
Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case. Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law, that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo. That is especially so given Mr. Bove’s comparison to the Bout prisoner exchange, which was quite expressly a quid pro quo [emphasis our own], but one carried out by the White House, and not the prosecutors in charge of Bout’s case.
(And hilariously, as shrewdly noted over at Scott Lemieux’s LGM, in her letter to Bondi, Sassoon says that, at a meeting with Adams’s attorneys, Bove admonished her aides for taking notes—literally bringing to life Stringer Bell’s famous admonition.)
Bove already has resorted to threatening Sassoon and the other prosecutors with investigations of their conduct in office. I don’t like his chances. Meanwhile, demands are heating up on New York governor Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove Adams as mayor. Once that happens, Eric Adams will find how friendless he really is, and Kathy Hochul will find it necessary to stop listening to her voicemail for the foreseeable future.
What in the Mitch McConnell Is Going On?!
