Drama over Adams case raises questions about Trump administration’s

CNN
 — 

Call it the Thursday afternoon massacre.

The Justice Department is in crisis after the stunning resignation of the top prosecutor in Manhattan and five other senior officials over the DOJ’s decision to halt the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges.

It took less than a month for Donald Trump’s new DOJ to be engulfed by a controversy that supercharges concerns the president’s political aims are compromising the application of the law.

The drama — which recalls the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate fame — represents the most high-profile effort yet by Justice Department officials to push back against Trump’s DOJ leadership, which is tasked with ending the “weaponization” of justice but which critics fear is perpetuating it.

Danielle Sassoon, who quit as the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, laid out stunning allegations of political interference in a letter to new Attorney General Pam Bondi. And she said that the New York City mayor’s attorneys had repeatedly urged a quid pro quo under which Adams would help Trump’s hardline immigration policy if the case were dropped.

Sassoon wrote that the DOJ’s order for her to dismiss the case against the Democratic mayor was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.”

An attorney for Adams on Thursday said the idea that there was quid pro quo is “a total lie” and said that the mayor’s legal team was asked by prosecutors whether the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement “and we truthfully answered it did.”

Sassoon’s resignation, on the face of it, looks like a courageous act of a prosecutor sacrificing her promising career to thwart an apparent attempt to politicize justice.

Her claims add significant new context to a previous Justice Department memo, which argued that the prosecution “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime” that it said rose under the Biden administration.

In itself, that memo was extraordinary since it suggested the prosecution was shelved because it conflicted with the president’s political priorities. The memo, for instance, said that the decision to drop the case was reached without assessing the “strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.”

Sassoon’s complaints were met with a notably brusque letter from Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, who is a former member of Trump’s personal legal team. He accused her of continuing to pursue “a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case.”

Adams, who faces reelection this fall, was indicted in September on charges related to bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals in exchange for political favors.

He has denied all wrongdoing and has frequently said that the prosecution was politically motivated payback for his criticism of the Biden administration’s failure to stem migrant arrivals in New York — a claim the Trump DOJ has embraced.

The administration’s handling of the Adams case seems to show that what Trump says is an effort to purge the “weaponization” of justice is already substituting political, rather than legal, rationales for prosecutorial decisions.

“I’m all for de-weaponizing the Justice Department,” Thomas Dupree, a former deputy assistant attorney general, who is also a conservative, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “But the way you de-weaponize the Justice Department is by taking politics out of the equation.” Dupree said the letters suggested that “the administration was expressly infusing a law enforcement decision with political considerations.”

The controversy cast immediate doubt on the future of the DOJ’s attempt to dismiss the case against Adams since the developments are likely to come to the attention of Judge Dale Ho, who needs to sign off on the move.

Sassoon resigned before Bove could act upon his plan to fire her, two people familiar with the matter said.

But it will be hard for the DOJ…