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UPDATE (February 14, 2025, 12:13 p.m. ET): This post has been updated to include the news about Hagan Scotten's resignation, bringing the total number of prosecutorial resignations to seven.
Mass resignations among leading federal prosecutors are extraordinarily rare. In fact, there’s really only one dramatic example from modern American history: The “Saturday Night Massacre” that resulted from Richard Nixon’s effort to oust special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and ultimately led the Republican president to resign in disgrace.
A half-century later, the public was confronted with what some have already labeled “the Thursday afternoon massacre.” NBC News reported:
The top federal prosecutor in New York and two senior federal prosecutors in Washington have resigned after they refused to follow a Justice Department order to drop the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, multiple officials said Thursday. The resignations amount to a stunning public rebuke of the Trump administration’s new Justice Department leadership in one of the country’s highest-profile criminal cases.
At last count, at least six prosecutors, including the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, have stepped down over this week’s Justice Department order in the Adams case.
Before digging in further, let’s review how we arrived at this point.
New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, was indicted by federal prosecutors on corruption charges last fall, and soon after, the Democrat launched an unsubtle effort to cozy up to Donald Trump and his team. (He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
The tactics apparently worked: Earlier this week, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove — who formerly worked as a defense attorney for the incumbent president — ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the corruption charges against the mayor. While this sometimes happens because officials conclude that there’s a problem with the merits of the case or the reliability of the evidence, Bove argued, among other things, that the case should go because of Adams’ willingness to work with the Trump administration on matters related to immigration and crime policy.
It raised widespread and unavoidable concerns that politicians aligned with the White House were effectively eligible for get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Complicating matters, Monday’s order was for the charges against Adams to be dismissed, but the same order said that the charges could be refiled again in the future. This left the mayor in a rather precarious position: Adams no doubt realized that if he failed to satisfy his new pals in the Trump administration, they could revive the criminal indictment against him.
It’s against this backdrop that the mayor also met this week with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, and agreed to give immigration officials access to the Rikers Island jail complex, despite local laws that appeared to prohibit such a move.
But just as important are the developments surrounding the relevant prosecutors. As NBC News’ report added, Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced her resignation on Thursday, the day after she took concerns directly to Attorney General Pam Bondi, writing a letter to the nation’s chief law enforcement officer about the handling of the Adams case.
Sassoon specifically pointed to a Jan. 31 meeting between Bove, Adams’ attorney and prosecutors in Manhattan.
“Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Sassoon wrote. “Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.”
Sassoon also said in the letter that her office was preparing to file additional charges against Adams “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.”
Sassoon asked to meet with Bondi directly. That request was apparently declined.
For his part, Adams’ lawyer described allegations of a quid pro quo as “a total lie,” while Bove wrote a memo of his own, pushing back against Sassoon’s allegations, accusing her of “insubordination.”
Nevertheless, when Justice Department officials also tried to move the Adams case to the Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., John Keller, the acting head of the Public Integrity Section, reportedly refused to drop the case against Adams and resigned. According to NBC News’ report, three other members of the section also resigned.
The total number of resignations apparently reached six when Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, also refused to drop the charges against the New York mayor and resigned.
The next morning, a seventh prosecutor also resigned, with Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the corruption case against Adams, also quit, and he did not go quietly.
In his resignation letter, Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.”
He went on to write, “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.”
Ouch.
In the interest of context, let’s also note that Sassoon is a registered Republican, a Federalist Society member, and a lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She’s not, in other words, a progressive Biden appointee who somehow stuck around after Trump’s inauguration.
Time will tell what happens next in the case, but to the extent that Republicans are still desperate to find evidence of politicized law enforcement, and a “weaponized” federal justice system, this looks like a story they should find awfully interesting.