One of many lead prosecutors dealing with the sweeping public corruption case in opposition to Mayor Adams resigned on Friday — in a searing letter to President Trump’s Division of Justice saying he wouldn’t be the “fool” who information a movement to dismiss the case based mostly on help for the administration’s immigration goals and never the legislation.
Assistant U.S. Lawyer Hagan Scotten, a extremely regarded prosecutor within the Southern District of New York and embellished U.S. Military veteran who served in Iraq, in his resignation letter to Trump’s appearing No. 2 on the DOJ Emil Bove, stated he was “entirely in agreement” with the previous appearing U.S. Lawyer Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday.
Sassoon stated she couldn’t log out on the request to drop the fees in opposition to Adams that stemmed from what’s successfully a “quid pro quo” between the mayor and the president that included the DOJ dropping the fees in trade for Adams getting consistent with the president’s immigration insurance policies within the nation’s largest sanctuary metropolis.
Within the letter, which was first reported by The New York Occasions, Scotten — who has clerked for Supreme Court docket Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — stated some could view Bove’s “mistake” in gentle of their unfavorable views of the Trump administration, which he stated he didn’t share.
“I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if 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,” Scotten wrote.
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then 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.”
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Appearing Deputy Lawyer Normal Emil Bove. (Getty)
Scotten excoriated Bove for the explanations he specified by a Monday night time memo to Sassoon ordering her to drop the case. The primary — that former hard-charging Manhattan U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams in some way tainted the case by making a private web site after leaving workplace and writing an op-ed usually commenting on corruption in New York — Scotten stated was “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”
The second justification that Adams ought to be capable of help the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, Scotten stated, “is worse.”
“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,” Scotten wrote.
Bove’s Monday memo requested the case to be dismissed with out prejudice, which means that it might be revived and stated it was not based mostly on the case’s deserves. It’s been panned as successfully holding Adams hostage to the Trump administration’s hardline immigration techniques as he runs for reelection.
Scotten’s blistering resignation letter got here the morning after what many have already dubbed the “Thursday night massacre” on the DOJ, echoing President Nixon’s notorious 1973 DOJ purge.
He marks the seventh DOJ staffer to resign after Trump’s former felony protection lawyer, managing the day by day functioning of the federal authorities’s legislation enforcement arm in an interim capability, ordered the dismissal of the bombshell case in opposition to Adams set to go on trial in April.
Adams has pleaded not responsible to a five-count indictment accusing him of abusing his authorities positions beginning when he was Brooklyn borough president in 2014 by accepting luxurious advantages from rich international businessmen and officers in or near the authoritarian-leaning Turkish authorities seeking to achieve affect over him.
In keeping with the feds, he started soliciting and accepting unlawful marketing campaign donations from his international benefactors in round 2018, which had been then funneled by way of U.S. residents and multiplied by eight with taxpayer {dollars} by way of town’s public matching funds program.
In a letter to U.S. Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi the day earlier than she resigned, Sassoon stated she had been ready to file extra fees in opposition to Adams, accusing him of destroying and instructing others to do away with proof and offering false info to the FBI. She stated a superseding indictment would even have expanded on allegations that the mayor criminally engaged in a bootleg straw donor scheme.
Adams’ lawyer, Alex Sprio, has denied there was any settlement between Adams and the DOJ concerning immigration enforcement and stated “if SDNY had any proff whatsoever that the mayor had destroyed evidence they would have brought those charges – as they continually threatened to do.”
Former Manhattan federal prosecutor and Fordham Regulation Faculty professor Bruce Inexperienced, who heads the Louis Stein Heart for Regulation and Ethics’, on Friday stated Bove’s memo to drop the case was “abusive” and that Sassoon had made the suitable alternative.
“One can only conclude that the decision was made for improper partisan political reasons. Prosecutors are not permitted to prosecute, threaten to prosecute, or decline to prosecute, to serve partisan political ends,” Inexperienced stated.
“There is not always a judicial remedy when they do that, but that is still an abusive — indeed, unconstitutional — use of government power. Ms. Sassoon rightly refused to be a party to that impropriety. The acting U.S. Attorney’s resignation is in the best professional tradition of her Office and of the Department of Justice.”
Initially Revealed: February 14, 2025 at 1:25 PM EST
