Danielle Sassoon, assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, left, arrives at court in New York, US, on Thursday, March 28, 2024.
Yuki Iwamura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A seventh federal prosecutor resigned Friday over the Department of Justice’s controversial order to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The prosecutor, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to top DOJ official Emil Bove, said “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case.
Within hours of Sassoon quitting, five top prosecutors at the DOJ resigned, rather than execute Bove’s order.
Scotten in his letter said that Bove’s stated rationales for dismissing the Adams case were without merit. Bove had said comments former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams made about the case, along with the case interfering with Adams’ ability to “fully cooperate with the federal government” about the enforcement of immigration policies in New York.
“In short, the first justification for the motion — that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys — is so weak as to be transparently pretextual,” Scotten wrote.
“The second justification is worse,” Scotten wrote. “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.”
The prosecutor wrote, referring to Trump, “I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful deal.
“But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”
Scotten is a Harvard Law School grad, who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He had been placed on administrative leave by Bove on Thursday, along with another prosecutor on the Adams case, Derek Wikstrom.
Bove in a letter to Sassoon said he was taking that step after she indicated that Scotten and Wikstrom agreed with her decision to refuse to drop the case, and were “unwilling to comply with the order to dismiss this case.”
Bove said the prosecutors would be investigated by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility for their conduct, along with Sassoon. Bondi then would determine if Scotten and the prosecutors should be fired, Bove wrote.
Scotten in his resignation letter told Bove, “There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake.”
“Some will view the mistake you are committing here in light of their generally negative views of the new Administration,” Scotten wrote. “I do not share those views.”
