By The Editorial Board
President Donald 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 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 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 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 Adams’ acquiescence and support for the Trump administration’s desires, starting with its crackdown on illegal immigration.
This board called on 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 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 Adams if he continues his candidacy for reelection.
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 Adams for their own purposes but also on corrupting the prosecutors and civil servants in the department itself. That much was clear in letters written by 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 Bove, the acting deputy attorney general who served (and lost) as 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 Adams’ opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” 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,” Scotten said in his resignation letter.
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, he has shamelessly sought to win Trump’s favor, and the mayor’s lawyers asked for a pardon for him.
In a clear sign that Trump’s protection comes with expectations, Adams made an appearance with 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. Homan was unusually forthright during the appearance in saying that the administration expected 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?’” Homan said.
Adams, of course, denies that his intent in courting Trump was ever to have the federal charges dropped and says that he remains independent. And Bove and Adams’ lawyers deny any quid pro quo. But as 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 Bove’s memo,” she wrote. In it Bove wrote that the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violence crime.” It is clear that Trump’s and Bove’s claims about the Adams indictment being politicized by prosecutors and the Biden administration are specious. The lawyers installed by 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.
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 Adams have been charged as well and that 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.
Appealing to the better instincts of this new Trump administration — with its open disdain for law and morality — has so far proved a losing proposition. And it would be naive to hope that the public backlash to this abuse of power will give Trump and Bondi real pause about further such 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 matter enormously. The attempt to dismiss the charges against 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 Bove has threatened against Sassoon, Scotten and other prosecutors who defied his order, if held in public, will hardly reflect favorably on the Justice Department. Sassoon and Scotten could not be credibly denounced by 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, 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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