Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned just days after she was ordered to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor.
Then, when Justice Department officials sought to transfer the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption cases, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.
The resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department.
The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversee the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession on Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams.
The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political. The No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.
Mr. Bove, in accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation, informed her that the prosecutors who worked on the case were being placed on administrative leave, and would be investigated by the attorney general and the Justice Department’s internal investigative arm. He told Ms. Sassoon both bodies would also evaluate her conduct.
He wrote he had accepted her resignation “based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York did not immediately comment. An official with the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment.
Ms. Sassoon, who had supported the case against Mr. Adams, notified her office of her decision in a brief email shortly before 2 p.m. The office has not filed a motion to dismiss the case.
“Moments ago, I submitted my resignation to the attorney general,” she wrote in the email, the text of which was provided to The New York Times. “As I told her, it has been my greatest honor to represent the United States and to pursue justice as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.”
She continued: “It has been a privilege to be your colleague, and I will be watching with pride as you continue your service to the United States.”
It was not immediately clear who would replace her, but typically, it would be the office’s No. 2 official, the deputy U.S. attorney, a role currently held by Matthew Podolsky.
The Trump administration last month named Ms. Sassoon, a veteran prosecutor, to head the office on an interim basis while Mr. Trump’s choice for the job, Jay Clayton, awaited Senate confirmation.
Ms. Sassoon was immediately swept into conversations with Justice Department officials about the criminal case against Mr. Adams.
Mr. Adams was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, stemming from an investigation that began in 2021. Mr. Adams had pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April.
Then, on Monday, Mr. Bove directed Ms. Sassoon to dismiss the case. She was also told to cease all further investigative steps against Mr. Adams until a review could be conducted by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, presumably Mr. Clayton, after the mayoral election in November.
The Southern District has long been viewed as the nation’s most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office, handling complex and often high-profile cases involving Wall Street, national security and public corruption.
Although the office is part of the Justice Department — there are 93 U.S. attorney’s offices around the country — the Southern District has a reputation for guarding its independence and fending off interference from Washington, winning it the nickname “the Sovereign District.”
Ms. Sassoon, 38, joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
Ms. Sassoon is best known for the successful fraud prosecution and 2023 conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who received 25 years in prison. She also prosecuted Lawrence V. Ray, who was convicted in 2022 of extortion and sex trafficking related to his abuse of Sarah Lawrence College students. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
In 2023, Ms. Sassoon was named co-chief of the Southern District’s criminal appeals unit, the position she held when she was promoted last month to interim U.S. attorney.
Mr. Bove in his order to drop the case said that the directive “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts” of the prosecutors working on the case, nor Ms. Sassoon’s efforts in leading them.
Mr. Bove said that the dismissal of charges was necessary because the indictment “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and had “improperly interfered” with Mr. Adams’s re-election campaign.
The memo criticized the timing of the charges and “more recent public actions” of Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney who brought the case, which Mr. Bove said had “threatened the integrity” of the proceedings by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that could taint potential witnesses and jurors.
Mr. Bove appeared to be referring to an article Mr. Williams wrote last month, after leaving office, in which he said New York City was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”
The indictment against Mr. Adams was announced in September by Mr. Williams, who led the office during the Biden administration. Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has claimed that he was targeted because of his criticism of the administration over the influx of more than 200,000 migrants into the city — an assertion the Southern District has rebutted, noting that the investigation began well before the mayor made those comments.
Mr. Adams has praised parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later. The two men did not discuss a pardon, but Mr. Trump spoke about a “weaponized” Justice Department, The New York Times reported.
Mr. Trump had criticized Mr. Adams’s prosecution, saying the mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly,” and had floated the possibility of a pardon.
On Jan. 22, just after Ms. Sassoon was elevated to her post, the Southern District vigorously defended its prosecution in a court filing made in her name. The filing cited “concrete evidence” that Mr. Adams had taken illegal campaign contributions. It called his claim that his prosecution was politically motivated an attempt to divert attention “from the evidence of his guilt.”
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