Corruption fighters around the world are surely appalled at the Trump Administration’ s latest strike against the rule of law. And certainly heartened by the refusal of both politically-appointed and career prosecutors to be complicit.

On February 10 Acting Deputy Attorney General Emile Bove ordered federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon to dismiss bribery charges pending against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon, a Trump appointee, resigned in protest.  Bove then went down a list of career prosecutors hunting for someone who would obey his order. At last count seven had also resigned rather than carry out the order. Details on the still developing story from open sources are here, here, and here.

A prosecutor’s duty to the law and to follow orders, Liptak writes:

“reflects a schism in conservative legal thought over how prosecutors, now working for a Trump-led Justice Department, should balance their duty to obey orders from superiors with their obligation to follow their best understanding of the law. One view emphasizes caution, deliberation, and independent and decentralized judgment, while the other values top-down vigor in the service of policy goals that can seem transactional if not unprincipled.

In his speech, Jackson argued: “It is an unusual case in which [the line prosecutor’s] judgment should be overruled.” He also famously observed there that:

 “The prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society; when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”

Sassoon leaned on both passages in her resignation letter. While duty-bound to follow the orders of her superiors, she said she also had a responsibility to the law. That responsibility bars prosecutors from following an order to dismiss a case when the order is not the product of a good-faith difference of opinion about the merits of a case but, as with the Bove order, politically motivated. In this case, an agreement that in return for dismissal, Mayor Adams will support the Trump Administration’s deportation policies.  

Late in the afternoon, after this post appeared, Bove found someone willing to sign a motion asking the court to dismiss the case. The signer, a career prosecutor, reportedly agreed to do so to protect his colleagues in the Department of Justice’s Public Corruption Unit from being fired en masse. The dismissal motion is here.

This is not the end of the story. Under federal law, dismissal is “by leave of the court,” and it will therefore be up to the judge assigned the case to determine whether dismissal is warranted. Hence, resolution of the Trump/Bove effort to undermine the rule of law and the fight against corruption remains to be written. First in a court of law and ultimately in the court of public opinion.

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• Firestorm grows over Trump DOJ’s deal to drop charges against Eric Adams (here)
• ‘It was never going to be me’: How Trump’s DOJ sparked a crisis and mass resignations (here)
• Trump DOJ Resignations: List of Prosecutors and Officials Quitting in Protest (here)
• The Trump Trial of Danielle Sassoon (here)
• Hagan Scotten, Lead Prosecutor of Eric Adams, Resigns in Awesome Letter (here)
• Is Main Justice Obstructing Justice? (here)
• Judge doesn’t immediately rule on DOJ’s push to drop corruption charges (here)

Resignation of letter of Hagan Scotten, Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York

Mr. Bove [Acting Deputy Attorney General],

I have received correspondence indicating that I refused your order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment. That is not exactly correct. The U.S. Attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, never asked me to file such a motion, and I therefore never had an opportunity to refuse. But I am entirely in agreement with her decision not to do so, for the reasons stated in her February 12, 2025, letter to the Attorney General.

In short, the first justification for the motion – that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys – is so weak as to be transparently pretextual. The second justification 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.

There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. 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. 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.

Please consider this my resignation. It has been an honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.