Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. We started the week wondering about the Trump administration’s commitment to obeying court orders. But it was prosecutors refusing to heed commands within the Justice Department that marked a shocking turn only weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, as several lawyers resigned rather than dismiss the Eric Adams indictment to advance Trump’s political aims. While the Adams affair is just one scandal in the opening days of Trump 2.0, it epitomizes the administration’s values, manifested in the battle between a top DOJ political appointee, Emil Bove, and the prosecutors who refused to do his and Trump’s bidding.
Bove had ordered Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, to drop the bribery case against the city’s Democratic mayor. The acting deputy attorney general’s brazen memo on Monday claimed the DOJ wasn’t offering Adams a quid-pro-quo of ditching the case (for now) in exchange for the mayor’s help with immigration enforcement. But if Bove — a former Trump criminal defense lawyer — was crafting a corrupt bargain with the defendant, it’s hard to see what he would’ve done differently. To be clear-eyed about all this, Trump seemingly wanted to do Adams a short-term favor while keeping the option open of resurrecting the case if the Democrat became politically inconvenient to the Republican.
The partisan nature of the Adams affair became even more apparent later in the week when Sassoon resigned rather than betray her oath. Her feelings became public in a remarkable letter she wrote Wednesday to Trump’s newly confirmed attorney general, Pam Bondi. Sassoon, a Republican who clerked for GOP icon Antonin Scalia, went to the former Trump impeachment defense lawyer with her concerns. “Although Mr. Bove disclaimed any intention to exchange leniency in this case for Adams’s assistance in enforcing federal law,” Sassoon told Bondi, “that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo.”
Sassoon’s letter paints a damning picture of Bove and is worth reading in full. She said that he “admonished” a member of her team who took notes during a meeting about the case and that he “directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.” Far from wanting to drop the case, she wrote that her office was ready to bring additional charges against Adams, including, she said, evidence that he “destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” Sassoon told Bondi she’d resign if the attorney general were unwilling to meet with her or reconsider Bove’s order.
Bondi apparently declined, and Sassoon resigned. But that was hardly the end of the matter, with Bove responding by writing another letter that was at least as jarring as his Monday memo. He accused Sassoon of losing sight of the oath she took when she started at DOJ, saying “under your leadership, the office has demonstrated itself to be incapable of fairly and impartially reviewing the circumstances of this prosecution. Therefore, the prosecution of Mayor Adams is transferred to the Justice Department, which will file a motion to dismiss the charges.”
It wasn’t just Sassoon who stood up, with several other DOJ lawyers resigning rather than go along. That included her colleague Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case and another Republican who clerked for GOP-appointed judges (John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh). Scotten wrote a scathing resignation letter to Bove stating that any federal prosecutor “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.” The DOJ may have found someone, according to Bondi’s remarks on Friday. She told Fox News that it’s her “understanding” that the case “is being dismissed today.” As of late Friday afternoon, the DOJ still hasn’t filed a motion to dismiss the case. And even the filing of such a motion wouldn’t by itself dismiss the case, because the judge would still need to sign off and he just might have a few questions before doing so. Again, the Adams affair was just one legal story this week, while the series of lawsuits sparked by Trump’s early executive actions keep working their way through the courts as new suits emerge, including one challenging Elon Musk’s authority. Amid the barrage of legal filings and court orders, we learned that the Trump DOJ is prepared to seek the reversal of a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent that has long protected federal agency independence. Coupled with the Adams story and others, the willingness to go after that precedent highlights a theme of Trump’s second term: the bid to consolidate power and the resistance to that effort, not only from the judiciary but, as we learned this week, from everyday prosecutors who made clear they work for the United States — not for Trump. Have any questions or comments for me? I’d love to hear from you! Please email deadlinelegal@nbcuni.com for a chance to be featured in a future newsletter.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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