President Trump’s determination to bend the American justice system to his will, combined with his broad tolerance for political corruption and his abhorrence of checks and balances on his power, slammed hard last week into the commitment to duty, honor and the rule of law shared by a group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C. The confrontation between Mr. Trump’s lieutenants at the Justice Department — led by his former personal defense lawyer, Emil Bove III — and Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and her colleagues is the clearest example yet of this administration’s efforts to bake quid pro quo deal making, coercive tactics, loyalty tests and other dishonorable practices into American government and warp its long-held principle of equal justice before the law.
Those tactics are being used not just in Washington, but increasingly at the state and city level, too, particularly against local policies that Mr. Trump opposes. In this case, the Justice Department has undermined the ethical and trustworthy governance of New York City by moving to let its mayor, Eric Adams, off the hook for corruption charges brought by Southern District prosecutors, in apparent exchange for Mr. Adams’s acquiescence and support for the Trump administration’s desires, starting with its crackdown on illegal immigration.
This board called on Mr. Adams to resign last September, after the indictment was unsealed; the damage and destabilization now resulting from this devil’s bargain between the mayor and the Justice Department make it only more urgent that Mr. Adams step down. If he does not, he must face an investigation and possible prosecution by state officials. New York City voters will also have an important say in the matter. In the June mayoral primary, they will have to muster the clarity and resolve to stop Mr. Adams if he continues his candidacy for re-election.
What is so alarming about the Trump Justice Department’s actions is that the nation’s top law enforcement officials are bent not just on turning an intentionally blind eye to their peers alleging illegal actions and exploiting the misconduct of a desperate lackey like Mr. Adams for their own purposes, but on corrupting the prosecutors and civil servants in the department itself. That much was clear in letters written by Ms. Sassoon and her Southern District colleague Hagan Scotten outlining the reasons they would not obey the flagrantly dishonest and untenable order to drop the Adams charges from Mr. Bove, the acting deputy attorney general who had served (and lost) as Mr. Trump’s criminal lawyer in his hush money case. The resignation letters by the two prosecutors, both with conservative backgrounds, are compelling declarations of why demands like these from the administration are serious violations of democratic practice, tradition, precedent, decency and legality.
“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Mr. Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Ms. Sassoon wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” followed Mr. Scotten in his own resignation letter.
Mr. Adams became the first sitting mayor in modern New York City history to face a criminal indictment when he was charged last September with five federal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and bribery. Since then, Mr. Adams has shamelessly sought to win Mr. Trump’s favor, and the mayor’s lawyers asked for a pardon for him.
In a clear sign that Mr. Trump’s protection comes with expectations, Mr. Adams made a joint appearance with Mr. Trump’s so-called border czar, Thomas Homan, on Fox News, after the deal was reached. They collegially discussed reopening an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at the city’s Rikers Island jail, contrary to New York law. Mr. Homan was unusually forthright during the Fox appearance in saying that the administration expected Mr. Adams to comply with its mass deportation efforts.
“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch — I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” Mr. Homan said.
Mr. Adams, of course, denies that his intent in courting Mr. Trump was ever to have the federal charges dropped and says that he remains independent. And Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams’s lawyers deny any quid pro quo. But as Ms. Sassoon wrote in her letter, the mayor’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” to federal prosecutors, offering to assist in the president’s immigration enforcement in exchange for dropping the charges.
And the deal that the mayor offered “is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo,” she wrote. In it, Mr. Bove wrote that the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violence crime.” It is clear that Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Bove’s claims about the Adams indictment being politicized by prosecutors and the Biden administration are specious. The lawyers installed by Mr. Trump never questioned the validity or seriousness of the charges; their case for dismissal was driven by the mayor’s potential usefulness to the Trump administration.
That follows Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of federal power to squeeze and control officials in realms beyond his reach, from private business to higher education to local government. He has done much the same to federal workers who might demonstrate unwanted independence as they execute their responsibilities or meet their legal and constitutional obligations.
In the case of Mr. Adams, the president and the Justice Department are sending a message that they intend to dispense with the impartiality, precedents, norms and very laws on which the American justice system depends. In seeking dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams “without prejudice,” the Justice Department is sending the clear message that they can be reinstated, should he stray from the Trump line.
All of this leaves New York City with a mayor plainly unfit for office, whose credible accusations of corruption — let’s remember that five aides or associates of Mr. Adams have been indicted as well, and seven others have left office under pressure — are now joined by the strongest possible disincentive to cross the president in any way. If he is loyal to the great city he was elected to lead, he will resign. Many leading New York political leaders have already demanded that he do so. Some of them have also demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul take immediate action to use her legal authority to fire him if he continues to refuse to do so.
Ms. Hochul has wisely resisted that path. At a time when Mr. Trump is so brazenly attacking democratic norms through overreaching assertions of executive branch authority, the idea that Ms. Hochul would take the unprecedented step of removing a democratically elected official outside of the traditional electoral process is unwise. Though the situations are quite different — Ms. Hochul actually has the legal authority for such an action, something Mr. Trump has lacked in so many of his early moves — this is not the time for Democratic Party leaders to muddy the waters around respect for democratic norms, especially when they need to make the case against Mr. Trump’s subversion of the rule of law. More appropriately, the City Charter has provisions for a five-member “committee on mayoral inability” to remove him, though the presence of Mr. Adams’s appointees may make this outcome less likely.
In the meantime, Ms. Hochul, other elected officials and leaders in the city, state and Democratic Party — many who have called for his resignation — should press Mr. Adams to resign on his own accord. And it will be important for officials, including state prosecutors, to continue to hold him to account for any illegal or unethical moves. (Many of the actions cited by federal prosecutors would also constitute state crimes, and could be investigated and charged by the Manhattan district attorney.) If it comes to it, New York City voters will have the final say on Mr. Adams’s political future in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, in which he is likely to be a candidate, or in the general election in November.
Appealing to the better instincts of this new Trump administration — with its open disdain for law and morality — has so far proven a losing proposition. And it would be naïve to hope that the public backlash to this abuse of power will give Mr. Trump and Attorney General Bondi real pause about such further abuses in the future. But the efforts of prosecutors, civil servants, elected officials and others to document and decry this injustice, and to stand up and even resign in the face of this administration’s transgressions, matters enormously. The attempt to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams must still come before the federal district judge assigned to the case, Dale Ho, and he may yet conduct a thorough inquiry on the government’s action.
If so, the investigations Mr. Bove has threatened against Ms. Sassoon, Mr. Scotten and other prosecutors who defied his order, if held in public, will hardly reflect favorably on the Justice Department. Ms. Sassoon and Mr. Scotten could not be credibly denounced by Mr. Trump as woke or radical — she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, a renowned conservative, and is a member of the conservative Federalist Society; he is a decorated Special Forces veteran who clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts.
In his first term, Mr. Trump was often restrained from his most dangerous impulses by people who knew better. He has taken great care this time to exclude such people from his entourage, leaving it to brave and truly patriotic civil servants to stand up to him, like the seven Justice Department lawyers who resigned rather than carry out the order to drop the Adams indictment.
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