The threat of a mass firing was unspoken but loomed over the videoconference call.
Summoning the staff of the US justice department’s public integrity section on Friday morning, the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, was matter-of-fact. Two lawyers needed to step forward to sign a request to dismiss corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams.
An earlier call with the section’s supervisors had gone badly. Three of them quit rather than abandon an important criminal case for brazenly political reasons. In all, seven prosecutors would resign to avoid taking a step they saw as deeply unethical.
Bove gave them an hour to make up their minds. The nearly 20 lawyers on the video call were unnerved, aware that the decisions might eviscerate their ranks and damage the department’s credibility. Some had already written their resignation letters. But a senior member of the team volunteered to sign, in part to spare his younger colleagues.
That fraught hour revealed the determination of President Donald Trump’s appointees to ram through a top-down command that ran counter to the professional standards of career lawyers and challenged the independence of the justice department.
People with with knowledge of the events spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Adams was indicted in September on charges of bribery, fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions and conspiracy as part of a scheme involving the Turkish government. Federal prosecutors in the southern district of New York have vehemently defended the case and recently hinted at the possibility of additional charges against the Democratic mayor.
In demanding the case be dropped, Bove claimed that the timing of Adams’s indictment, about nine months before the city’s primary, gave “appearances” of political interference, and aiding a mayor who wanted to help deport immigrants in the country illegally outweighed convicting him of taking bribes.
Bove concluded, in a court filingn, that “continuing these proceedings would interfere with the defendant’s ability to govern in New York City, which poses unacceptable threats to public safety, national security and related federal immigration initiatives and policies”.
Bove and US attorney general Pam Bondi have argued that dropping the charges against Adams is part of a broader effort to end the “weaponisation” of the justice department by reining in excesses of the Biden administration.
But the request to drop the case has elicited outrage among justice department employees.
In an eight-page resignation letter to Bondi, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, said the government did not have a valid basis to seek the dismissal of the case.
“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,” wrote Sassoon, who was appointed just last month by Donald Trump as the interim attorney for New York’s southern district.
On Friday, the lawyers in the justice department’s public integrity section confronted a stark choice that also reflected something of a generational divide in their office. Some of the older lawyers agreed with the principle of resigning in protest, but they also felt a pull to be practical and try to preserve the institution as much as possible.
The resignations of seven leading prosecutors, including Sassoon and Hagen Scotten, the lead prosecutor in the Adams case, sent a blaring message, they said. The public integrity section was working on about 200 cases, and the departure of all the lawyers in the section would risk bringing them to an end.
Already, they noted, defence lawyers were peppering Bove – a former member of Trump’s criminal defence team – with appeals to drop cases based on arguments similar to his reasoning in the Adams case.
Then came a volunteer.
After 30 minutes of discussion, Ed Sullivan, a long-time prosecutor in the section, offered to sign Bove’s motion. Doing so would protect the other lawyers, he believed, and in some ways, he did not have as much to lose.
Fifteen years ago, Sullivan was investigated surrounding misconduct in the prosecution of the late Republican senator for Alaska, Ted Stevens. While other lawyers were found to have acted improperly, Sullivan was ultimately exonerated.
Respected by his peers in the department, Sullivan had a public reputation that had to some degree been tarnished by that investigation and the mere fact that he was part of a case that was a humbling setback for the department. If he signed, he reasoned, the consequences would not be much worse than what he had already endured.
A debate ensued, with some uncertain that it was the right course.
For the prosecutors, resigning could mean more than just losing their jobs; it could also endanger their livelihoods. As the Trump administration drastically cuts the federal workforce, private law firms are awash with resumes from government lawyers, and many firms see little point in hiring expertise in white-collar defence work, given that the administration has signalled that it will cut back on such cases.
Nevertheless, the prosecutors believed that resisting Bove’s demand while protecting their other cases surpassed any other factor, no matter the price.
Eventually, with just a couple of minutes left before Bove’s deadline for a decision, Sullivan noted that the prosecutors had run out of time to deliberate, and he would put his name on the filing.
Many in the group considered Sullivan’s decision to step forward an honourable act.
Along with Sullivan, another lawyer put her name on the document: Antoinette Bacon, known as Toni. Current and former justice department officials view her role more critically.
A long-time prosecutor in Ohio, Bacon had joined the administration to run the criminal division – an appointment that had been initially greeted with relief by career officials. But as the standoff between Bove and career prosecutors persisted last week, many who report to Bacon came to see her as unquestioningly following Bove’s instructions, despite her years of experience as a corruption prosecutor.
Neither Bacon nor a justice department spokesperson responded to requests for comment.
The Manhattan judge overseeing the case against Adams, Dale E Ho, must now decide how to respond to the request for it to be dropped.
Across the department, dismay has set in over the standoff in the case, which echoes a grim moment during the Watergate scandal known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Rather than carry out an order from Richard Nixon to fire the prosecutor investigating him, several senior political appointees resigned.
The current conflict, some in the department believe, is worse. When senior leaders resigned in 1973, they were in essence standing up to the White House, even as political appointees.
But now the department’s leaders are taking aim at their own lower ranks, in what many current and former justice department officials describe as a profound betrayal of the shared cause of justice.
Bove and Bacon could have signed the Adams motion at any time, without drawing other department lawyers into it, the officials said. Proceeding this way appeared to accomplish little more than forcing career prosecutors to capitulate. − This article originally appeared in The New York Times
