It seems like New York Mayor Eric Adams got exactly what he wanted from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice—and then some.
Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, two days after acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams. Bove claimed that they hindered the mayor’s ability to target immigrants at Trump’s behest.
In a scathing eight-page letter announcing her resignation, Sassoon revealed that her office was preparing to hit Adams with a superseding indictment from a new grand jury.
“We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme,” Sassoon wrote.
Sassoon, who has a strong conservative record and clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, warned that dismissing the case against Adams would amplify—rather than abate—concerns about weaponization in the Department of Justice.
Adams was previously hit with a 57-page indictment, including five damning public corruption charges, alleging that he’d sought out and taken bribes from the Turkish government. The indictment refers to “a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” who “facilitated many straw donations” to Adams on behalf of foreign nationals and businesses.
Sassoon’s letter revealed that Adams’s attorneys were up to a similar gambit during his negotiations with the Justice Department. During a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Sassoon wrote, in a footnote of her letter.
“Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion,” Sassoon said, indicating that Bove didn’t wish for a record of Adams’s request to exist. It seems that Adams got exactly what he wanted from Trump’s DOJ.
In her letter, Sassoon criticized the rationale behind dismissing the charges, arguing that Bove and the DOJ had “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based.” Instead, Bove argued that dismissal was necessary on policy grounds because the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”
Sassoon pointed out that “Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on ‘fanfare and sensational claims.’”
“Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal,” she added.
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