At least six Justice Department officials decided this week to quit rather than obey an order to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. The sheer number of resignations in such a short period of time has reminded legal experts of the Saturday Night Massacre.
It was Oct. 20, 1973, and President Richard M. Nixon was seeking to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor leading the Watergate investigation. Mr. Nixon and his subordinates had sought to cover up a connection between the White House and a botched burglary attempt at the Washington office building that gave the scandal its name.
But the attorney general at the time, Elliot L. Richardson, refused to fire Mr. Cox and chose to resign instead. The deputy attorney general, William D. Ruckelshaus, also refused to do so and was fired. The order was eventually carried out by Robert Bork, the solicitor general. (Mr. Nixon was impeached, and eventually resigned.)
What happened this week in the Adams case was the Saturday Night Massacre “on steroids,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote on Thursday.
In both instances, there was a “clash between the president’s personal preferences and what Justice Department lawyers think the rule of law requires,” Mr. Vladeck said in an interview on Friday.
Danielle R. Sassoon, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, chose to offer her resignation on Thursday instead of dropping the Adams case. The lead prosecutor on the investigation, Hagan Scotten, has also announced his resignation.
Ms. Sassoon has accused the mayor’s lawyers of urging “what amounted to a quid pro quo” of assistance with the president’s immigration crackdown if the mayor’s case is dismissed. On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had not asked for the case to be dropped.
But experts still see parallels with Mr. Nixon.
“You have a sort of Damocles hanging over the mayor in the event that he does not cooperate with the president and his immigration policy objectives,” said Juliet Sorensen, a former federal prosecutor and professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law who has also written a case book on public corruption and the law.
She said that it could be inferred by the directive that the mayor’s indictment could be reinstated. Mr. Nixon wanted to stave off the Watergate investigation and now, she said, Mr. Trump wants Mr. Adams to cooperate with his immigration policy agenda.
She also said that in both cases, career lawyers resigned in protest “as a matter of professional responsibility and refused to get in line behind a blatantly political objective.”
Since 1973, there have been plenty of examples of lawyers resigning rather than following directives given by their superiors, Mr. Vladeck said.
“But we haven’t seen this sort of large-scale resignation all because the lawyers refuse to do something the political masters wanted them to do since that Saturday night in 1973,” he said.
Garrett Graff, who has written a book about Watergate, said that comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre were “inescapable,” and even argued that what happened this week was worse.
“Nixon’s fight with the special prosecutor was a question of presidential power and executive authority,” Mr. Graff said. What is happening now, he said, is “even more fundamentally corrupting for the foundation and principles of the rule of law in American life, which is a Justice Department dropping legitimate charges against a public official in exchange for political favors.”
Mr. Vladeck said the resignations were likely to influence what happened to the mayor’s case and could lead courts to question the Justice Department’s credibility. The Adams case is being overseen by Judge Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The resignations could also make it difficult for the department to recruit high-power lawyers like Ms. Sassoon and her colleagues, Mr. Vladeck said.
“These are the people you want in those jobs,” he said. “If you’re coming out of law school and you’re interested in a career public service, this is a flashing red light about whether you really want to go work for this particular department.”
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