One of the lead prosecutors handling the sweeping public corruption case against Mayor Adams resigned on Friday — in a searing letter to President Trump’s Department of Justice saying he wouldn’t be the “fool” who files a motion to dismiss the case based on support for the administration’s immigration objectives and not the law.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and decorated U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, in his resignation letter to Trump’s acting No. 2 at the DOJ Emil Bove, said he was “entirely in agreement” with the former acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday.
Sassoon said she could not sign off on the request to drop the charges against Adams that stemmed from what’s effectively a “quid pro quo” between the mayor and the president that included the DOJ dropping the charges in exchange for Adams getting in line with the president’s immigration policies in the nation’s largest sanctuary city.
In the letter, which was first reported by The New York Times, Scotten — who has clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — said some may view Bove’s “mistake” in light of their negative views of the Trump administration, which he said he did not share.
“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 the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” Scotten wrote.
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then 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.”
Getty
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove. (Getty)
Scotten excoriated Bove for the reasons he laid out in a Monday night memo to Sassoon ordering her to drop the case. The first — that former hard-charging Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams somehow tainted the case by making a personal website after leaving office and writing an op-ed generally commenting on corruption in New York — Scotten said was “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”
The second justification that Adams should be able to assist the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, Scotten said, “is worse.”
“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 wrote.
Bove’s Monday memo asked the case to be dismissed without prejudice, meaning that it could be revived and said it was not based on the case’s merits. It’s been panned as effectively holding Adams hostage to the Trump administration’s hardline immigration tactics as he runs for reelection.
Scotten’s blistering resignation letter came the morning after what many have already dubbed the “Thursday night massacre” at the DOJ, echoing President Nixon’s infamous 1973 DOJ purge.
He marks the seventh DOJ staffer to resign after Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, managing the daily functioning of the federal government’s law enforcement arm in an interim capacity, ordered the dismissal of the bombshell case against Adams set to go on trial in April.
Scotten, who did not immediately respond to the Daily News’s request for comment, has handled several high-profile public corruption cases at the SDNY, including the case against the FBI’s former counterintelligence chief Charlie McGonigal for conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions against Russia in his retirement, the campaign finance case against former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, and the wire fraud and extortion case against Mayor Adams’ protege “Bling Bishop” Lamor Whitehead. All resulted in convictions.
Following the mass resignations, Trump’s DOJ brass are searching for a prosecutor who will put their name on a motion to dismiss the case to submit to the presiding Judge Dale Ho, who has to sign off on it for the case to go away.
Adams has pleaded not guilty to a five-count indictment accusing him of abusing his government positions starting when he was Brooklyn borough president in 2014 by accepting luxury benefits from wealthy foreign businessmen and officials in or close to the authoritarian-leaning Turkish government looking to gain influence over him.
According to the feds, he began soliciting and accepting illegal campaign donations from his foreign benefactors in around 2018, which were then funneled through U.S. citizens and multiplied by eight with taxpayer dollars through the city’s public matching funds program.
In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi the day before she resigned, Sassoon said she had been prepared to file more charges against Adams, accusing him of destroying and instructing others to get rid of evidence and providing false information to the FBI. She said a superseding indictment would also have expanded on allegations that the mayor criminally engaged in an illicit straw donor scheme.
Adams’ lawyer, Alex Sprio, has denied there was any agreement between Adams and the DOJ regarding immigration enforcement and said “if SDNY had any proff whatsoever that the mayor had destroyed evidence they would have brought those charges – as they continually threatened to do.”
Former Manhattan federal prosecutor and Fordham Law School professor Bruce Green, who heads the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics’, on Friday said Bove’s memo to drop the case was “abusive” and that Sassoon had made the right choice.
“One can only conclude that the decision was made for improper partisan political reasons. Prosecutors are not permitted to prosecute, threaten to prosecute, or decline to prosecute, to serve partisan political ends,” Green said.
“There is not always a judicial remedy when they do that, but that is still an abusive — indeed, unconstitutional — use of government power. Ms. Sassoon rightly refused to be a party to that impropriety. The acting U.S. Attorney’s resignation is in the best professional tradition of her Office and of the Department of Justice.”
Originally Published:
Leave a comment