You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.
Sassoon’s refusal followed a long, strange courtship between Adams, a Democrat who not so long ago called himself the “Biden of Brooklyn,” and Trump, who lately evinces fellow-feeling for any politician facing corruption charges, and who clearly saw an opportunity to neutralize the Mayor of his home town. The pair’s entwinement involves William Burck, one of Adams’s lawyers, who was recently named an “outside ethics adviser” to the Trump Organization. On Monday, one of Trump’s criminal-defense attorneys, Emil Bove III, now newly installed as the President’s “enforcer” at the Justice Department, sent a memo to Sassoon directing her to put the Adams case on ice. In exchange for Adams’s coöperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown, Bove’s memo said, the Justice Department was prepared to endorse the Mayor’s unsubstantiated theory of the case against him: that it was a politically motivated prosecution provoked by his criticism of former President Joe Biden’s border policies. “It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior Administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed,” Bove wrote. “There shall be no further targeting of Mayor Adams.”
Adams gratefully accepted this dubious gift. “Now we can put this cruel episode behind us,” he said on Tuesday, in a brief live-streamed victory speech. He declared himself exonerated. “I never broke the law, and I never would.” Even some of the Mayor’s staunchest allies couldn’t believe it. “It certainly sounds like President Trump is holding the Mayor hostage,” the Reverend Al Sharpton said. Trump Administration officials did little to dispel the hostage theory. “I’m coming up there Thursday to meet with the Mayor—either he comes to the table or we go around him,” Tom Homan, the President’s “border czar,” said during a radio interview. On Thursday, Adams announced that he was loosening the rules around ICE operations on Rikers Island, the city’s giant jail complex. “I want to work with the new federal administration, not war with them,” he said.
But the plan was predicated on everyone going along with it. And, as the days passed this week, and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan made no move to officially shelve the Adams case, it became increasingly apparent that the Justice Department had some dissension in its ranks. On Wednesday evening, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Bove’s newly sworn-in boss, held a press conference to announce a lawsuit against New York State for its “sanctuary” immigration policies. She was asked about the status of the Adams case. “That case should be dropped,” she said. “I didn’t know that it hadn’t been dropped yet, but I’ll look into that.”
She didn’t have to look for long. On Wednesday, Sassoon sent Bondi an eight-page letter, explaining in detail why she would not do Bove’s bidding. The letter is explicit, thorough, and forceful. “It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Sassoon wrote. She made the remarkable disclosure that her office was prepared to charge Adams with misconduct beyond the bribery charges he’d been hit with in September—that prosecutors had evidence that the Mayor “destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence.” She described a meeting that took place in late January between Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and the prosecutors on the case, during which Adams’s attorneys, she wrote, “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo.” Sassoon wrote that she felt she owed it to the Constitution to speak up, citing Scalia, one of her conservative mentors. “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially,” she wrote. She just couldn’t stomach it. (Alex Spiro, Adams’s lawyer, denied the accusations in Sassoon’s letter, saying that, if prosecutors had “any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges.”)
On Thursday, Bove accepted Sassoon’s resignation, and wrote her an eight-page reply, which was leaked to the press. In every way that Sassoon’s letter is clear-eyed and measured, Bove’s reply is weak and hysterical. “The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination,” he wrote, clearly restraining himself from exclamation points. “You lost sight of the oath that you took.” The tone was unmistakable: middle-manager embarrassment. Bove threatened Sassoon and the lead prosecutors on the case with an investigation. He wrote that the Adams case was being transferred to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. But that, too, backfired. Within hours, several senior leaders in the Public Integrity Section had resigned as well, according to the Times. No one would rid Bove of this troublesome indictment.
For three weeks, prominent members of the Democratic Party have been claiming powerlessness in the face of Trump’s egregious acts in office. They’d been similarly passive about Adams’s increasingly cozy relationship with the new President. “No reaction at this point in time,” the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said, on Tuesday, after news of the deal between the Mayor and the Justice Department broke. “I’m going to continue doing what I’ve done since September, when all this started,” New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, said, that same day. Hochul has the legal power to remove Adams from office, but she has expressed ambivalence about exercising that power since he was indicted in the fall. Sassoon’s letter has, among other things, increased the number and volume of calls for Hochul to take this huge and serious step—including one from her own lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who tweeted Thursday night that New York City “deserves a Mayor accountable to the people, not beholden to the President.” On Friday morning, Adams appeared alongside Tom Homan on “Fox & Friends,” the Fox News morning show. The Mayor tried to argue that he was still in control of his own destiny, still in charge of the city, but the border czar undercut him. “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” Homan said. “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’ ” ♦
