Hagan Scotten, assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned Friday instead of dropping the criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, suggesting only a “fool” would follow the order to drop the case.
Scotten said he was never directed to dismiss the charges from head SDNY attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday, in a hostile letter to acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten said near the end of the letter. “But it was never going to be me.”
The former New York prosecutor said he agreed with Sassoon’s rationale for her refusal to drop the charges. He called former SDNY attorney Damian Williams’s alleged corruption of the case “so weak as to be transparently pre-textual.”
Bove said in his letter to Sassoon that Williams’s political activities after he left as head prosecutor, including an op-ed he wrote criticizing Adams, tainted the case.
“His actions inappropriately politicized and tainted your office’s prosecution, potentially permanently,” Bove wrote.
He also mentioned Scotten and fellow assistant attorney Derek Wikstrom were being placed on “off-duty, administrative leave pending investigations by the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of Professional Responsibility.”
Scotten also suggested the federal government used a quid pro quo in potentially dismissing the charges in exchange for Adams’s immigration cooperation.
“No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.
The prosecutor said he understands why President Donald Trump would want to make a “good, if not distasteful, deal.”
“But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” he added.
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Scotten served multiple combat tours in Iraq as an Army special forces officer, earning two Bronze Stars during his career.
He also clerked under conservative Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and John G. Roberts after graduating from Harvard Law School.