One of many lead prosecutors dealing with the sweeping public corruption case towards 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 primarily based on assist for the administration’s immigration goals and never the regulation.
Assistant U.S. Lawyer Hagan Scotten, a extremely regarded prosecutor within the Southern District of New York and adorned U.S. Military veteran who served in Iraq, in his resignation letter to Trump’s performing No. 2 on the DOJ Emil Bove, mentioned he was “entirely in agreement” with the previous performing U.S. Lawyer Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday.
Sassoon mentioned she couldn’t log out on the request to drop the costs towards Adams that stemmed from what’s successfully a “quid pro quo” between the mayor and the president that included the DOJ dropping the costs in alternate for Adams getting in keeping 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 Instances, Scotten — who has clerked for Supreme Courtroom Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — mentioned some might view Bove’s “mistake” in mild of their damaging views of the Trump administration, which he mentioned 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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Performing 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 one way or the other 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 mentioned was “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”
The second justification that Adams ought to have the ability to help the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, Scotten mentioned, “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, that means that it may very well be revived and mentioned it was not primarily based 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 legal protection lawyer, managing the each day functioning of the federal authorities’s regulation enforcement arm in an interim capability, ordered the dismissal of the bombshell case towards 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 trying to acquire affect over him.
In line with the feds, he started soliciting and accepting unlawful marketing campaign donations from his international benefactors in round 2018, which have been then funneled via U.S. residents and multiplied by eight with taxpayer {dollars} via town’s public matching funds program.
In a letter to U.S. Lawyer Normal Pam Bondi the day earlier than she resigned, Sassoon mentioned she had been ready to file extra costs towards Adams, accusing him of destroying and instructing others to eliminate proof and offering false info to the FBI. She mentioned 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 relating to immigration enforcement and mentioned “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 Legislation College professor Bruce Inexperienced, who heads the Louis Stein Middle for Legislation and Ethics’, on Friday mentioned Bove’s memo to drop the case was “abusive” and that Sassoon had made the suitable selection.
“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 mentioned.
“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
