Last week, seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than sign off on dismissing federal criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. They were right to do so because the dismissal is a blatant quid pro quo, with charges being dropped in exchange for Adams agreeing to assist in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The affair highlights how the second Trump administration is speedrunning the authoritarian playbook, taking less than a month to reach the stage where its demands are so blatantly illegal that even loyalists can’t carry them out.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, previously employed as one of Trump’s defense attorneys, ordered the charges dropped, but not for the typical reasons criminal charges are dismissed, such as prosecutorial misconduct or insufficient evidence. Instead, Bove said that the pending criminal charges meant that Adams couldn’t devote sufficient attention to fighting illegal immigration and violent crime.
Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, center
Needless to say, this is not a typical reason to dismiss criminal charges. It is, however, reminiscent of an argument Trump made regarding the criminal charges he himself dealt with: that if a president faced a threat of future prosecution, it would prevent them from taking “bold and unhesitating action,” so he should be immune from prosecution.
Of course, the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court bought that argument, inventing absolute presidential immunity out of whole cloth. Bove’s argument here was roughly the same—how could Adams fully engage in kicking immigrants in the teeth if he had to take time away to defend himself in a criminal case?
Besides being based on an illegal quid pro quo arrangement, the dismissal of Adams’ charges came with another highly unusual piece: The charges were to be dismissed without prejudice, meaning they could be refiled at any time. This gives the administration a ton of leverage over Adams. The DOJ can simply threaten to refile the criminal charges any time that Adams proves insufficiently vicious to New York City immigrants or irks Trump in some other way.
Danielle R. Sassoon, the former interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York
This demand was so abnormal that the first person to refuse to carry it out wasn’t some Biden-era holdover appointee or a woke liberal federal prosecutor. Rather, it was Danielle Sassoon—a Federalist Society member and former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia—whom Trump had appointed interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York just a few short weeks previously. Sassoon penned a remarkable letter detailing the quid pro quo and revealing such tidbits as Bove admonishing a member of Sassoon’s team for taking notes during the negotiations.
Several other prosecutors followed suit, resigning rather than signing off on this unethical arrangement. Kevin Driscoll, a deputy assistant attorney general, and John Keller, the acting chief of the public integrity section, both left, and three prosecutors on Keller’s team did as well.
The lead prosecutor on the Adams case, Hagen Scotten, also stepped down, saying that Bove would “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.” Like Sassoon, Scotten is no wild-eyed liberal, having clerked for both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh back when the latter was a federal appeals judge.
Bove then convened a meeting of the whole public integrity section, demanding that two people step forward and sign the dismissal. Implicit in the demand was that everyone would be fired unless someone stepped up. A career prosecutor, Ed Sullivan, agreed to sign to prevent the mass firing. Another prosecutor, Antoinette Bacon, also signed off, but in Bacon’s case, those who report to her have said she seems to be genuinely all in on following Bove.
President Richard Nixon, left, and Vice President Gerald Ford chat in the Oval Office in December 1973.
Bove also signed the dismissal, an act that highlights how much the demand that other prosecutors sign off was nothing but a loyalty test, a way to see how far the administration could push federal prosecutors into acting unethically. At any time, Bove and Bacon could have signed the dismissal, avoiding the multi-day resignation spree that made Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a quaint tea party. In that situation, Nixon tried to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was leading the Watergate investigation, and the chaos that ensued.
In theory, the United States was supposed to have some guardrails against the DOJ being weaponized like this. Historically, the DOJ has maintained a level of separation from the White House because the department is supposed to serve the people, not the president.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, declared that Trump will now set the priorities and objectives. In a memo issued immediately after she took office, she declared that DOJ personnel had to be “ready and willing” to do the president’s bidding.
Outside of the DOJ, Trump is also trying to make it much less safe for federal employees to blow the whistle on exactly the kind of behavior Bove engaged in here. He fired Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the federal agency that investigates retaliation against whistleblowers and executive branch ethics violations.
Attorney General Pam Bondi
Under the law, Dellinger can only be removed for “neglect of duty, malfeasance or inefficiency,” but Trump didn’t even bother pretending there was a reason for getting rid of Dellinger. Instead, Dellinger received a one-line email just saying his position was terminated effective immediately.
Dellinger sued over his termination, and a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary order keeping him on the job while the case proceeds. After the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift the temporary order, Trump asked the Supreme Court to take up the matter, arguing he was irreparably harmed by not being able to remove independent agency heads simply because he felt like it.
All of these acts are part and parcel of Trump consolidating power within the executive branch. Demanding federal employees engage in illegal or unethical acts is designed to weed out those who won’t go along with his plans.
It’s terrifying that it took such a short time for those demands to be so over-the-top that even people otherwise ideologically aligned with Trump had to tap out. It’s equally terrifying that he’s seeking complete control over agencies that were previously independent. He’s warping the whole executive branch to be nothing but a place where amoral loyalists do his bidding. Now, unvarnished, unrestrained authoritarianism feels right around the corner.
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