Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for Manhattan who resigned rather than drop the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams, explained her refusal in a Feb. 12 letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Ms. Sassoon’s letter reads as if it also has another intended audience: Federal District Judge Dale E. Ho, who is holding a hearing Wednesday on the Justice Department’s request to drop the case. In her letter, Ms. Sassoon gave Judge Ho a road map, laying out reasons he might conduct a “searching inquiry.”
Emil Bove III, the Justice Department official who ordered the case dropped, has said he did so without considering the evidence of Mr. Adams’s criminality, which Ms. Sassoon said was substantial.
Mr. Bove said the dismissal was necessary so the mayor could enforce President Trump’s immigration policy. Ms. Sassoon and others have accused Mr. Bove of making an inappropriate deal with Mr. Adams to drop the case in exchange for the mayor’s support for Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Asking Judge Ho to sign off “is likely to backfire,” Ms. Sassoon wrote. “In particular, the court is unlikely to acquiesce in using the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure.”
She cited case law in which courts have said judges should examine whether such dismissals are “in the public interest,” including a 1977 case in which a judge, David Norton Edelstein, declined to drop the prosecution of alleged price fixing in the sale of malaria drugs derived from South American cinchona bark. Judge Edelstein, who sat in the Southern District of New York, said he was not obligated to “rubber stamp” a request made for inappropriate reasons.
Judge Ho has stressed a need for transparency throughout the Adams case, Ms. Sassoon noted in her letter, writing that he would likely conduct “a lengthy judicial inquiry that is detrimental to the department’s reputation, regardless of outcome.”
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