Before she resigned in protest of the Justice Department’s order to dismiss a corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan made a troubling claim.
In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, said the Justice Department was essentially offering a quid pro quo to Mr. Adams — dropping the charges against him in exchange for his cooperation in enforcing President Trump’s immigration policies.
Ms. Sassoon, who was then serving as the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, cited conversations during a meeting she had in late January with Mr. Adams’s lawyers and Emil Bove, the Justice Department official who ordered her to drop the case in a memo on Monday. Mr. Bove’s memo cited immigration enforcement as one of the reasons the prosecution should be killed.
Ms. Sassoon said in the letter that during the meeting, Mr. Adams’s lawyers said the mayor could assist with immigration enforcement “only if the indictment were dismissed.” She added that Mr. Bove scolded one of her prosecutors for taking notes on the conversation and had them confiscated when the meeting ended.
Although Mr. Bove has denied trading the case for the enforcement of an immigration crackdown, as has the mayor and his lawyers, “that is the nature of the bargain laid bare in Mr. Bove’s memo,” Ms. Sassoon wrote.
Ms. Sassoon’s accusation injects a measure of irony into the internal debate over how to handle Mr. Adams’s case: One of the crimes he was charged with committing was trading official action for personal benefit. Federal prosecutors said he had accepted luxury travel in exchange for pressuring the New York Fire Department to sign off on opening a high-rise consulate building for the Turkish government.
Ms. Sassoon noted in her letter that prosecutorial power cannot be used to coerce defendants, saying that could be considered legal misconduct. Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the Adams case — who was put on leave before he resigned — went further in his resignation letter to Mr. Bove, calling such behavior illegal.
“Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” he wrote.
Even if it could be proven that Mr. Adams and Mr. Bove had made a deal like that, it is not clear that the arrangement would be a prosecutable crime. But Carrie H. Cohen, a former federal and state prosecutor in New York who brought many corruption cases, said that regardless of whether such a deal fits neatly within the definition of bribery, it would unquestionably be wrong.
“Is it appropriate to say, ‘I will take official actions related to immigration policy for personal gain’?” said Ms. Cohen, now a defense lawyer. “No. That is what the bribery laws are supposed to prevent.”
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