The president’s handpicked prosecutors balked at an openly corrupt legal bailout for New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
by Ryan Cooper, David Dayen
One of the key events of the Watergate scandal was the Saturday Night Massacre, in which President Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating the incident. When he refused and resigned, Nixon ordered the deputy attorney general to do it, but he also refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork did fire the prosecutor, but Nixon’s actions convinced the public that the scandal was serious.
President Trump and his lackey Attorney General Pam Bondi have now done Richard Nixon one better by sparking a much larger mass resignation among top law enforcement officers. At the time of writing, seven prosecutors have resigned in protest over acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s order to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Back in September, the Biden Department of Justice indicted Adams on five counts of corruption, including wire fraud, bribery, conspiracy, and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign sources. Federal prosecutors presented evidence that Adams had received illegal luxury benefits, like free international flights, from Turkish officials, and in return pressured the city government to allow a Turkish consulate to open in the city without a fire inspection. He also allegedly set up a straw donor scheme to inflate his number of small donors, thus allowing him to defraud New York’s program to match such donations to the tune of $10 million.
Adams has been begging Trump for a pardon ever since last November’s election. Remarkably, as The New York Times reports, Bove negotiated personally with Adams’s lawyers—including Alex Spiro, who also works for Elon Musk, and Bill Burck, who’s worked for the Trump Organization—to iron out the agreement. Adams did not get a pardon, but rather an explicitly corrupt quid pro quo.
As Bove’s order explained, the charges would be dismissed without prejudice, meaning they could be brought back later. DOJ “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based.” Instead, “the pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”
There it is in black and white. The law as it applies to Adams will be ignored, so long as he does Trump’s bidding. Adams himself appeared on Fox News today with Trump deportation czar Tom Homan, who needled the mayor while admitting to the conspiracy again: “If he doesn’t come through … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
The obvious corrupt nature of the deal prompted acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle R. Sassoon—a Trump appointee and Federalist Society member who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia—to resign. Sassoon’s resignation letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi was blisteringly critical, and made more eye-popping allegations. “Adams has argued in substance—and Mr. Bove appears 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,” she wrote. Sassoon alleged that she had attended a meeting in which Adams’s attorneys had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo,” and that “Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.” This is literally a meme from The Wire.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
Sassoon further alleged that she had been preparing a superseding indictment accusing Adams of an obstruction conspiracy “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI,” and that she had new evidence about the alleged straw donor scheme.
Sassoon’s refusal to drop the case prompted Trump’s DOJ leaders to move the case to the department’s Public Integrity Section. But its acting head, John Keller, refused to drop the case and resigned, along with three other members of the section. The acting head of DOJ’s Criminal Division, Kevin Driscoll, also refused to do Bove’s bidding and quit.
A seventh prosecutor named Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney at the Southern District of New York and one of the leads pursuing the Adams case, also resigned on Friday morning, with a scathing letter that states, in part, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
At press time, there is a high-level meeting of all Public Integrity Section lawyers, where they are being told to either find someone to dismiss the Adams case or face a mass termination.
It should be noted that civil service laws (remember them?) protect any employee of the United States who refuses to take actions that “would require the individual to violate a law, rule, or regulation,” which would include the directive to “act impartially and not give preferential treatment to any private organization or individual.” Any firing for not carrying out a corrupt deal would be illegal and should trigger a lawsuit.
It is striking just how awesomely gratuitous this all is. Nixon sacked his attorney general because the investigation was closing in on him personally and he wanted to escape. It was corrupt, but it made sense as a desperate last-ditch effort. Trump is letting Adams off the hook because he wants a stooge dependent on his goodwill in the mayor’s seat while his deportation goons run riot in New York. That’s a modest benefit at best; the mayor has limited tools to prevent ICE operations, though he’s already offered up Rikers Island, the notorious prison that was due to close, as a migrant detention center.
It’s also apparent that Trump just loves corruption as such. What else can explain his pardon of Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was imprisoned for attempting to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat in 2008?
And it shows that the most willing enabler of Trump corruption in the entire government is Attorney General Bondi. This is approximately how she ran the Justice Department in Florida, doing favors for her donors and allies while firing attorneys in the department who got in the way, like the prosecutors looking into foreclosure fraud. The Adams case confirms that as long as Bondi is in office, the rule of law will be subordinate to Trump’s personal motivations.
There may be some partisan reasons for the attorney resignations. The apparent fact that the Democratic mayor of the largest city in America is flagrantly corrupt is tremendously humiliating for Adams’s party, and throws a wrench into Democratic arguments against Trump’s (even worse) corruption. It also puts New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul in a bind, as she tries with her habitual flailing incompetence to reconcile growing calls to sack him (something a New York governor can do with the state’s mayors) with the state party’s instinctive defense of its machine hacks. It would make sense for a Federalist Society prosecutor to be champing at the bit to nail Adams to the wall.
That said, if the original indictment against Adams is even close to accurate, Adams absolutely deserved to be prosecuted. Sassoon, Keller, Driscoll, Scotten, and the others deserve great credit for refusing to indulge Trump’s outrageous corruption. In this administration, we’ll take any kind of integrity we can get.
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