Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday after refusing to obey an order by President Trump’s Justice Department to dismiss the pending indictment charging Mayor Eric Adams with bribery and participating in a scheme to obtain illegal campaign donations.
In her letter to Attorney General Pamela Bondi a day before, Sassoon argued that the “law does not a dismissal,” adding that she is “confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged.”
In fact, Sassoon asserted the office was prepared to bring a superseding indictment to a new grand jury alleging that Adams “destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” She also stated prosecutors had found “further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.”
In response, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, the justice department official who had ordered the dismissal Monday, accused Sassoon of continuing to pursue what he described as “a politically motivated prosecution” against the mayor.
In a letter to Sassoon sent late Thursday, Bove accepted her resignation and went a step further, ordering that the prosecution team that handled the Adams case be put on istrative leave while the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility opens an investigation into their conduct.
Bove noted that DOJ officials would be seizing the prosecutors official cell phones and laptops and transferred prosecution to the Justice Department’s main office, which he said will file the motion to dismiss Adams’ indictment.
After that transfer of the case, five other lawyers at the Justice Department also resigned, according to reporting from the New York Times.
On Monday Bove sent a highly unusual edict to Sassoon, declaring that Adams’ indictment must be terminated because it was interfering with Adams’ ability to help Trump’s top priority initiative of deporting migrants.
The memo took the unprecedented step of linking a criminal justice decision to a policy initiative of the president, quoting one of Trump’s executive orders and voicing “particular concern” about “the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams’ ability to critical ongoing federal efforts to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.”
In her letter to Bondi arguing to keep the Adams’ case alive, Sassoon stated that the mayor has argued and the Justice Department appears to concede that he “should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the istration’s policy priorities.”
In the memo ordering that the Adams indictment be tossed, Bove also specifically stated that he hadn’t assessed the merits of the case or the legal theory behind the charges. But in his response to Sassoon’s resignation Thursday, he took a different tack.
Now he claimed the prosecutors had “convinced a grand jury to return an indictment based on a one-sided and inherently partial presentation of the evidence.” And he stated the case “turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, extremely aggressive.”
He described recent meetings with Sassoon and the prosecuting team prior to issuing his dismissal order, stating that he’d reviewed public filings, prosecutors’ memos and classified material, and convened a t meeting between prosecutors and Adams’ defense lawyers in his office.
He accused, without actually naming him, former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams of “rushing” the indictment because “he appears to have been pursuing” an appointment in the prospective istration of Kamala Harris. He also again alleged, without providing evidence, that the prosecution was linked to Adams’ criticism of the Biden istration’s immigration policies.
Sassoon, in her letter to Bondi, defended Williams, noting that the Adams’ case began before he took office, that he had minimal involvement and that the decision to bring the case was approved by career prosecutors in the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit.
The judge in the case, Dale Ho, must still sign off on such a request, and prosecutors are required to provide some explanation for their change of position. As of Thursday no such motion had been filed with the court.
Sassoon’s tenure as head of the high profile Southern District was brief. Acting Attorney General James McHenry appointed her to run the office Jan. 21, a month after Williams stepped down. Sassoon, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, had previously clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
On Thursday shortly after news of Sassoon’s resignation became public, the head of the city Department of Investigation, the agency that teamed with the FBI to investigate the Adams case, made a point of backing the integrity of the Southern District prosecutors who brought the case, along with the FBI.
DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber stated, “In the investigation that led to these charges, DOI conducted its work apolitically, guided solely by the facts and the law. I thank our dedicated Inspectors General and their teams, and our trusted law enforcement partners in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with whom we worked closely on this investigation, for their work and their commitment to our mission to provide independent oversight and to protect City government from fraud and abuse.”
