War In Southern District of New York: Inside the Bloody Battle Over the DOJ’s Crown Jewel

There was a time, not that long ago, when—together—Emil Bove, Hagan Scotten, and Danielle Sassoon were considered to be among the brightest stars at the Justice Department’s most prestigious office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, or SDNY. Scotten was a war hero and former clerk for the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice. Bove had made an almost unheard-of climb from paralegal to prosecutor and then unit chief. Sassoon, Bove’s protege and a former Supreme Court clerk for Antonin Scalia, seemed destined for higher things still.

Last week, they openly went to war—against one another. Sassoon and Scotten resigned, as did a number of prosecutors in Washington, ostensibly over the handling of a single case: that of New York Mayor Eric Adams. But after talking to a number of sources on every side of this, it’s become clear the ultimate stakes are far higher. Their fight has ballooned into a fight over, among other things, the notion the Justice Department and its prosecutors should be at all independent from the president’s will. SDNY has a well-earned reputation as the “sovereign district,” immune to any pressures from Washington. But in the second Trump administration, there is no room for two sovereigns.

Trump ran on a platform of retribution against perceived enemies that he says “weaponized” the justice system against him. “The fact that Danielle and then Hagan would rather resign than take a prosecutorial action based on politics,” puts the lie to that claim, says Brett Kalikow, their former Southern District colleague, noting he was speaking only from his personal perspective. “To me validated the fact that DOJ and SDNY, as I had always known it, had integrity, were not political institutions, and that all of the accusations of ‘weaponization’ were just false, and were cover for what I think this administration was planning to do when it took power.”

Though in conversation he’s soft spoken, maybe even a bit socially awkward, according to those who know him, Bove could be maximally aggressive in his dealings with defendants.

It’s been quite the turn for Bove, who made SDNY the center of his professional life for the better part of two decades. Though in conversation he’s soft spoken, maybe even a bit socially awkward, according to those who know him, Bove could be maximally aggressive in his dealings with defendants. “Bove is the perfect fucking hatchet man,” says one criminal defense attorney, Mark I. Cohen, who represented hundreds of defendants in SDNY cases. He was one of those prosecutors who remind you “how much power they have. He was forever reminding us of his stature,” he adds. It may not have won Bove many friends in Manhattan’s tight-knit legal community. But, those sources say, the bosses loved it. Bove took on bigger and bigger cases—from the man who planted bombs in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2016, to a drug-ring case that eventually ensnared the president of Honduras. He was eventually promoted to co-chief of the national security and international narcotics unit. Commuting to the City from rural Pennsylvania, he worked with the FBI to hunt down January 6th rioters. “He treated these cases as a priority,” a senior Bureau agent told NBC.

Bove saw something of a kindred spirit in Sassoon. They seemed to share a basic philosophically conservative orientation. (“Justice Scalia was my kind of feminist,” she wrote after his death. “He taught me how to fire a pistol and a rifle, and made me feel like I had grit. He thickened my skin, which was the best preparation for a career in a male-dominated field.”) More importantly, they were both deeply and long-term committed to their jobs, in an office where many of their colleagues seemed to be collecting credentials before taking $2,000-per-hour gigs at white-shoe law firms. Over time, Sassoon’s caseload got more and more impressive, too, including convicting the ringleader of the infamous sex cult at Sarah Lawrence College as well as the Sam Bankman-Fried, where her she cornered the crypto fraudster in an intense cross-examination, causing him to cop to part of the government’s case. She emerged as a leader in the wider legal community—including in Brooklyn, where the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York holds sway and the SDNY types are often viewed as snobs. “Eastern and Southern AUSAs [assistant U.S.attorneys] do not tend to interact with each other. But she was a delight to be around,” says one former prosecutor from the Eastern District. “She’s totally a serious prosecutor who put her head down and did the work.”

Bove left SDNY in early 2022, following a controversy in which a judge admonished his team for “errors and ethical lapses” in a case involving a businessman prosecuted for violating Iran sanctions (the man, Ali Sadr, was ultimately exonerated). Bove joined Donald Trump’s defense team in 2023.

Several weeks ago, the new Trump administration installed him as the acting #2 at the U.S. Justice Department, and Sassoon as SDNY’s interim chief.

“Bove is the perfect fucking hatchet man,” says Mark I. Cohen, who represented hundreds of defendants in SDNY cases. Bove, says Cohen, was one of those prosecutors who remind you “how much power they have. He was forever reminding us of his stature.”

Almost immediately, there were a series of discussions about the Eric Adams case. In a Feb. 10 memo, Bove instructed Sassoon and, by extension, lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten to “dismiss” the bribery and corruption charges against Adams, though the case could have been (and may be) brought at a future date. The case, involving alleged favors for the Turkish government in return for illegal campaign donations, was controversial, and scheduled to go to trial months before Adams would be on the ballot for reelection. Through another lens, Bove’s intention was merely to pause any further pursuit of that case and the four other major investigations into Adams and his inner circle until November. By then New York City’s mayoral election would be over and a permanent U.S. Attorney would be sworn in who could make his own evaluation about the case. (Adams’ lawyer didn’t return a request to comment for this story.)

Viewed in this light, one source observed, Bove might be seen as doing something of a solid for Sassoon, his one-time mentee. He would be taking the political heat for what was bound to be an explosive choice, all while going out of his way to compliment Sassoon and her team. “This directive,” he wrote in the Feb. 10 missive, “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case, or your efforts in leading those prosecutors.”

That is apparently not how Sassoon saw it. (She didn’t respond to a request for comment.) She quit three days later, sending a scorching public resignation letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “As you know, our office is prepared to seek a superseding indictment,” Sassoon wrote, charging Adams with conspiracy to obstruct justice for destroying evidence. Bove’s order, to Sassoon, was a way of heading those fresh charges off at the pass. What’s more, Sassoon wrote, Bove’s directive “amounted to a quid pro quo.” Bove in his Feb. 10 letter, wanted Adams’ case dropped so the mayor could “devote” himself fully to fighting “illegal immigration and violent crime.” On Friday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan went on TV and warned that if Adams “doesn’t come through” on his promise to aid Homan’s deportation push, “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is this agreement we came to?’” By Monday, at least three deputy mayors had announced their resignations.

Bove in a subsequent letter denied that there was any quid pro quo. But using leverage to force cooperation is deeply ingrained in the Trump DNA—remember his first impeachment? From a particular MAGA point of view, this isn’t much different from the deals prosecutors cut with defendants all the time.

Except the arrangement with Adams wasn’t designed to push an investigation forward, or to catch another crook. It was to advance the policy and political goals of the new administration—the exact thing Trump, his allies, and Adams himself had railed against when they complained about “weaponization.”

Enter Hagan Scotten, who was used to cases with a political edge. He prosecuted the men at the center of Trump’s first impeachment, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who worked with Rudy Giuliani to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Parnas’ lawyer, a cannabis attorney and podcaster, at one point accused Scotten of threatening to shoot him; neither the judge nor anyone else believed it. But years later, sources close to Adams told the New York Post that, based on incidents like this and others, Scotten was a risk-taking “cowboy.”

Scotten, like Bove, wasn’t necessarily trying to win popularity contests on the Manhattan legal circuit. Sources variously described him to me as “hot head,” “hard core,” “humorless,” “driven,” “tough,” and fully committed to SDNY.

Scotten had won two Bronze Stars in Iraq as a member of 5th Special Forces Group. At Harvard Law, he wrote to the paper to extol his professor, Elena Kagan, when she was nominated to the Supreme Court—just as he’d written to a key senator when a judge he clerked for, Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated. While Scotten was a political conservative, he found mentors on both sides: He clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, and he worked for Neal Katyal, President Obama’s acting Solicitor General, in private practice, before going to SDNY. Which is the point: prosecutors aren’t supposed to be political.

Cohen, the defense attorney, sees one major difference between Scotten and Bove, though. While both men could be unrelenting, Scotten used that drive for more than just racking up convictions. Once, Cohen recalls, Scotten went out of his way to help a defendant who wound up being a key informant in dozens of cases. Scotten twice brought that valued informant into federal custody to protect hat person from excessive punishment or retribution. “The guy, he’s a legal talent like you’re rarely seen,” Cohen says of Scotten. “I’ve had a practice in the Southern District and the Eastern District for nearly, what, 35 years. And listen, I worked against a lot of really smart people. But what he did the other day?” Cohen continued, striking a note of admiration. “Come on.”

Cohen was of course referring to the absolutely nuclear resignation letter Scotten sent to Bove, his one-time senior colleague. By this point, Bove had already put Scotten on administrative leave, and announced an internal probe into him and Sassoon. “Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens,” Scotten wrote. “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Katyal, Scotten’s onetime boss, tells me he “read that letter as him saying, ‘This is not the rule of law that I knew. This is not the Justice Department that I knew. This is some new and very dangerous development.’ … I’m sure it pained him greatly, and he did it because he had to have seen no other choice.”

Hagan’s letter was most certainly a fuck-you, from an office that’s been sending fuck-yous to Washington for decades.

According to a book by Geoffrey Berman, another former US Attorney from Southern, Trump’s Justice Department tried to get Berman to start a criminal investigation into former Democratic Secretary of State John Kerry. He refused. That administration also tried to get him to remove any references to the president during Southern’s prosecution of Trump’s one-time fixer, Michael Cohen. Berman refused again, and was eventually pushed to “voluntarily” resign. His successor Audrey Strauss pursued the same strategy, successfully overseeing the prosecution of Parnas and Fruman, among others.

Pushback against D.C. pressure has long been celebrated in legal circles. The choice to prosecute, or not, should be based on the merits of the case, not the target’s political connections. That’s especially true at SDNY, which attracts top legal talent like Scotten, Sassoon, and Bove—and prosecutes super-villains from Bernie Madoff to Jeffrey Epstein to the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.

But from the MAGA point of view, independence has been corrupted. To Trumpists, the Southern District, like so many parts of the Justice Department, has gone rogue. The resignations of Sassoon and Scotten prove that, as do the resignations by the senior leadership of the public integrity unit in Washington, as do the refusal by so many in that division to sign the document asking the judge in New York to dismiss Eric Adams’ case. These people are part of the executive branch of the federal government. How can they ignore a directive from the Chief Executive? “I take no pleasure in imposing these measures, initiating investigations,” Bove wrote to his one-time co-workers. But “that is what is necessary to continue the process of reconciliation and restoration of the Department of Justice’s core values.”

It’s the same reason that so many January 6th prosecutors are being fired, and units pursuing foreign bribery and covert influence cases have been dismantled. They’re deemed insufficiently loyal by a second Trump administration that is demanding that everyone around them bend the knee. From the Trumpist point-of-view, units like SDNY are so rotten, they need to be ripped out, root, branch, and stem—and replanted with something new. If SDNY is the Justice Department’s crown jewel, MAGA wants the entire sparkling headpiece.

“To these insubordinates, good riddance, for you no longer reign over what you view as the ‘Sovereign District of New York.’ Career federal prosecutors in SDNY are learning the hard way that they report to the deputy attorney general, who reports to the attorney general, who reports to the president,” pro-Trump legal activist Mike Davis wrote in a Fox News op-ed. “Any other way proves we have a deep state, which too many pretend is a conspiracy theory.”

What happens next is unclear. It should tell you something that Trump announced his pick to run SDNY at the same time he was naming his cabinet. That’s how important the position is to his future plans. That person, former Securities and Exchange Commission chief Jay Clayton—installed in that job by the first Trump administration—does not have a toadie’s reputation. But Trump has a longer list of foes this time, and he’s pledged to target them. Tish James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued for inflating the value of his properties, “should be prosecuted,” the president said. The judge overseeing that case “should be arrested and punished accordingly.” And Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan D.A. who battled Bove and incoming DOJ official Todd Blanche (who led Trump’s criminal defense team) to secure a felony conviction against Trump for falsifying business records during his hush-money payment to a porn star, should be held accountable for [a] crime.”

If they can get a prosecutor pliable enough to find one.