Mass resignations among federal prosecutors are incredibly rare in the American tradition, which made last week’s developments in New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ case so extraordinary. Donald Trump’s Justice Department allegedly struck an improper deal with the mayor to make the corruption charges against him go away, and the agreement was so brazen that at least seven prosecutors resigned in protest.
The Washington Post published a report soon after, noting that in the current moment, the prosecutors’ courage “could create a precedent for further acts of resistance if Trump orders other government officials to do things they find inappropriate or believe would violate their legal responsibilities.”
It was against this backdrop that, four days after the Adams case prompted a slew of principled resignations, it appears to have happened again. The New York Times reported:
A veteran federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., responsible for overseeing major criminal cases in one of the nation’s most important offices abruptly resigned on Monday, according to an email sent to colleagues. Denise Cheung, the head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, resigned rather than carry out a directive from the office’s Trump-appointed leadership, according to several people with knowledge of her actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The specific details surrounding Cheung’s departure are still coming into focus, but Reuters reported that she wrote in her resignation letter to interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin that she’d been ordered to investigate a government contract awarded during the Biden administration and pursue a freeze of the recipient’s assets.
The Reuters report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that, according to Cheung, the directive “was not supported by evidence.”
As for the nature of the contract, the Washington Post published a related report, which also has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, that said Cheung’s principled resignation stemmed from “a Justice Department effort to assist President Donald Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who said last week that he would try to rescind $20 billion in grants awarded by the Biden administration for climate and clean energy projects, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly.” The Post added that the Justice Department has the authority to freeze assets, “but it can only take that step when it has evidence suggesting the assets can be traced to a crime,” and in this instance, Cheung and Martin “disagreed over whether halting releases was inappropriate and unethical without such evidence, or whether she was disobeying the department’s leadership and investigative strategy of stopping releases and looking for evidence.” Martin, of course, is the Republican activist the “Stop the Steal” organizer whom Trump has nominated as the permanent U.S. attorney to serve as the top prosecutor in the nation’s capital. Or put another way, we probably haven’t heard the last of this story.
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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