The president did a political favor for the mayor. DOJ’s machinations to make that look like a legally compelled result blew up.
Yeah, we could see this one coming a mile away.
The interim United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, has resigned over the Trump Justice Department’s order that she drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and that she make a motion in court seeking dismissal of the indictment.
As I wrote earlier this week, the Justice Department’s directive, issued by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, with the approval of the just-confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi, was explicitly political. Indeed, Bove conceded that he had not evaluated the evidence in the case and did not question the integrity of Sassoon and the SDNY prosecutors assigned to the case – who only a few days earlier had made a submission to the court dismantling Mayor Adams’s claims that he’d been the victim of politicized prosecution by his fellow Democrats in the Biden DOJ.
Rather, the dismissal was ostensibly ordered because the indictment was supposedly interfering in Adams’s capacity to assist the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts (a claim Adams himself has denied), and because the indictment was supposedly politically timed. As the SDNY prosecutors point out, the corruption investigation of Adams was opened more than a year before he finally began criticizing President Biden over the tide of illegal immigrants flooding the city (prior to that, Adams was an advocate for the city’s sanctuary policies and blamed Republicans for the city’s being overwhelmed by “migrants”).
In the column, I offered some reasons why it might not be as easy to dismiss the case as Main Justice seemed to believe. Among these was that
if past is prologue, Main Justice should brace for some pushback from the SDNY. Bondi and Bove directed Sassoon “to dismiss the pending charges . . . as soon as is practicable[.]” Hence, the interim U.S. attorney must be willing to make the dismissal motion — meaning, direct one of the prosecutors who has spent years working on the case to make the dismissal motion. The rule of the road in the executive branch is that you must either follow a superior’s order or, if you determine you cannot follow the order in good conscience, resign. We’ll see what happens on that front.
And now we’ve seen what happened: Sassoon – a former Justice Scalia clerk who led the SDNY’s successful prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried and who was put in the interim U.S. attorney’s position after Trump took office – resigned. She refused to endorse the claim that her office’s case — built on allegations of bribery and illegal campaign contributions, described in lavish detail in the 57-page indictment — is a political hit job against Adams. From her informed standpoint, this was not Democrats eating their own; it was the SDNY doing what the SDNY has a decades-long track record of doing: pursuing political corruption cases regardless of which party is in power and even if it creates headaches for DOJ political appointees in Washington.
And it gets worse. When Sassoon declined to play along, the Justice Department attempted to reassign the case to the Public Integrity Section at Main Justice. But, the New York Times reports, the two top officials in that section, Kevin Driscoll and John Keller, followed Sassoon’s lead and resigned.
Assuming that the Times’ reporting is correct, Bove’s reaction to Sassoon’s resignation cannot be squared with his memorandum directing her to dismiss the case. The Times says:
Mr. Bove, in accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation, informed her that the prosecutors who worked on the case were being placed on administrative leave, and would be investigated by the attorney general and the Justice Department’s internal investigative arm. He told Ms. Sassoon both bodies would also evaluate her conduct.
He wrote he had accepted her resignation “based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”
But in his order to dismiss the case, issued only after consultations with Sassoon, Bove had written:
The Justice Department has reached this conclusion [to dismiss the Adams case] without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office at this time. Moreover, as I said during our recent meetings, this directive in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case, or your efforts in leading those prosecutors in connection with a matter you inherited.
Given this, how is Bove suddenly in any position to conclude that an investigation he has not objectively and comprehensively assessed is “politically motivated”? How is he in a position to claim that prosecutors, whose integrity he just got through suggesting was unimpeachable, should now be subject to an internal investigation?
And how did Danielle Sassoon violate her oath? It seems to me that she’s the one honoring her oath. Unlike Bove, she’s looked hard at the case and is convinced that it’s not politically motivated, so she refused to affirm Main Justice’s uninformed, patently political conclusion that it was. Nevertheless, she didn’t choose to continue pursuing the case in defiance of Main Justice; she resigned. She didn’t insubordinately put Bondi or Bove in a position of having to dismiss her; she did the honorable thing and quit.
That this puts them in a difficult political position is not her fault, it’s their fault.
Obviously, the Adams prosecution is legitimate, but President Trump wants it dropped. His minions at Main Justice want to make that look like a righteous decision, so they claim the prosecution was politically motivated. But they also know that they lack evidence that it is politically motivated and that, by saying it is, they impugn the integrity of their subordinates. Hence, they tried to get around those inconveniences by admitting they hadn’t studied the case, coming up with non-case-related political rationalizations for labeling the prosecution “politically motivated,” and claiming the “politically motivated” conclusion doesn’t mean the prosecutors who brought the charges were, you know, actually politically motivated.
In reality, President Trump decided it was in his interest to do a political favor for Mayor Adams. His subordinates tried to cloak this raw political gesture in legally palatable raiments. But the rationale offered was incoherent. Now that it has predictably blown up, they blame the people who wouldn’t play along.
To say that’s not going to work is an understatement.