The federal corruption case against Eric Adams, New York City’s independent mayor, came to an ignoble end earlier this month, but the fallout from the Justice Department’s handling of the case is ongoing. Reuters reported:
The three remaining federal prosecutors who brought criminal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams resigned in protest on Tuesday, saying the Justice Department pressured them to admit wrongdoing when they refused to drop the case, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
The Reuters report has been verified by MSNBC and NBC News.
“It is now clear that one of the preconditions you have placed on our returning to the office is that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing,” the three prosecutors wrote in their letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none.”
At this point, some readers are probably feeling a sense of déjà vu, but that’s because this is the second time the Adams case has generated multiple prosecutorial resignations.
In case anyone needs a refresher, the beleaguered mayor was indicted by federal prosecutors on corruption charges last fall. Soon after, Adams, who pleaded not guilty, launched an unsubtle effort to cozy up to Donald Trump and his team.
Those efforts proved effective: Just three weeks into the president’s second term, former Trump defense attorney Emil Bove, in his capacity as the acting deputy attorney general, ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. While this sometimes happens because officials conclude that there’s a problem with the merits of the case or the reliability of the evidence, Bove argued, among other things, that the case should go because of Adams’ willingness to work with the Trump administration on matters related to immigration and crime policy.
It raised widespread and unavoidable concerns that politicians aligned with the White House were effectively eligible for “get out of jail free” cards.
The developments were so egregious that Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced her resignation. In fact, instead of dropping the charges, Sassoon said her office was preparing to file additional charges against Adams “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.”
When Justice Department officials tried to move the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., John Keller, the acting head of the Public Integrity Section, reportedly refused to drop the case against Adams and resigned. According to an NBC News report, three other members of the section also resigned.
The total number of resignations apparently reached six when Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, also refused to drop the charges against the New York mayor and resigned.
The next morning, a seventh prosecutor also resigned, when Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the corruption case against Adams, also quit, and he did not go quietly. In his resignation letter, Scotten wrote 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.”
He went on to write, “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.”
This was two months ago. More recently, three assistant U.S. attorneys — Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom — who were previously placed on administrative leave after they refused orders by Blanche’s office to dismiss the charges against Adams, were offered an opportunity to return to their positions. There was, apparently, a catch: Trump’s Justice Department expected them to acknowledge wrongdoing. They were not prepared to do any such thing and instead decided to resign. On their way out, the prosecutors noted that they’d worked under Democratic and Republican presidents, but under Trump, things are different. “Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington,” they wrote in their resignation letter. The significance of these developments is dramatic: At issue is a dynamic in which a presidential administration told an allegedly corrupt public official that his legal troubles would go away if he agreed to play ball with the White House on an unrelated issue. Is it any wonder so many longtime prosecutors decided it was better to simply walk away from such madness? This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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