By Luc Cohen and Sarah N. Lynch
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Six senior Justice Department officials, including Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, resigned on Thursday rather than comply with an order to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, according to internal Justice Department letters seen by Reuters and people familiar with the matter.
The departures mark a sign of resistance from career Justice Department officials to President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the agency to end what he calls its weaponization against political opponents. Critics say Trump’s changes threaten to subject criminal prosecutions to political whims.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, the Trump administration’s recent pick to temporarily lead the office prosecuting New York Mayor Eric Adams, resigned her post on Thursday, according to the memorandum by Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a Trump appointee.
Sassoon said in a letter seen by Reuters that she had been prepared to seek a new indictment accusing Adams of destroying evidence and directing others to do so.
Bove had ordered Sassoon to dismiss the case on Monday, in what legal experts called an effort by Trump administration officials to assert control over a prosecutor’s office that has long prided itself on independence from politics.
Adams, a Democrat, has forged ties with Trump, a Republican. Adams has argued he was targeted by former President Joe Biden’s administration for criticizing its immigration policy. Bove wrote on Monday that the case was interfering with Adams’ ability to help Trump’s immigration crackdown.
In his Thursday memo, Bove wrote that Sassoon had refused to comply with what he called his office’s finding that the case against Adams amounted to “weaponization” of the justice system.
“Your office has no authority to contest the weaponization finding,” wrote Bove, Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer. “The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination.”
Bove wrote that the two main trial prosecutors on the Adams case would be placed on leave. He also said his office would take over the Adams case and move to dismiss it, though no formal motion to dismiss had been filed yet on Thursday afternoon.
In the letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi dated February 12 and seen by Reuters on Thursday, Sassoon said it would be improper to dismiss the charges in return for Adams’ help on immigration, in addition to saying she had planned new charges.
Adams had previously pleaded not guilty to charges he accepted bribes from Turkish officials.
Adams’ lawyer Alex Spiro said in an email to Reuters, “If SDNY had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges—as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months. This newest false claim is just the parting shot of a misguided prosecution exposed as a sham.”
A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York confirmed Sassoon’s resignation. Matthew Podolsky, a former financial crimes prosecutor who had been serving as Sassoon’s deputy, will now take her place, the spokesperson said.
POLITICAL PRESSURE
According to a person briefed on the matter, after Sassoon refused to dismiss the case, the Trump administration directed John Keller, the acting head of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, to do so.
Keller also resigned on Thursday, two people familiar with the matter said. Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the department’s criminal division, has also resigned, one of the people said.
Three other deputies in the Justice Department’s public corruption unit – Rob Heberle, Jenn Clarke, and Marco Palmieri – also resigned on Thursday over the orders to dismiss the Adams case, a person familiar with the matter said.
A Justice Department official confirmed Keller’s and Driscoll’s resignations, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the other three.
Since Trump began his second term in the White House on January 20, the new administration fired more than a dozen prosecutors who pursued criminal charges against Trump in two cases brought in 2023, and terminated some FBI officials and prosecutors who pursued cases against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to block Congress from certifying his election loss.
Bondi, in her first day on the job last week, issued a directive stating that Justice Department lawyers who decline to appear in court or sign briefs would be disciplined and possibly fired.
Thursday’s resignations sparked comparisons from legal experts to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973, when senior Justice Department officials resigned after refusing President Richard Nixon’s order to fire the special counsel investigating the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
Juliet Sorensen, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, also said the resignations were reminiscent of Trump’s decision in his first term to fire former FBI director James Comey to stop the bureau from investigating his 2016 presidential campaign.
“In both of those historical instances, as with the events of today, you have the chief executive of the United States bringing extreme political pressure by virtue of their high office against non-political Department of Justice personnel,” Sorensen said.
SOUTHERN DISTRICT HAS TRADITION OF INDEPENDENCE
A half-dozen former SDNY prosecutors told Reuters this week that the order from Bove, himself a former SDNY prosecutor who also served as Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, raised questions about whether the office can remain independent of political pressure during Trump’s second White House term.
In her letter to Bondi, Sassoon said dismissing the charges would only heighten concerns that the Justice Department had been weaponized.
“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” Sassoon wrote.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Additional reporting by Jack Queen in New York and Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Writing by Luc CohenEditing by Lisa Shumaker)
