Yesterday I offered some comments on acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s directive to U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to dismiss without prejudice the pending criminal charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. I’ll spell out more fully here why I think that Sassoon deserves praise for resisting, and then resigning in the face of, Bove’s directive.
1. Let me start by emphasizing that the question whether Sassoon acted properly is distinct from the question whether Bove is implementing President Trump’s wishes. To put it another way: A president has all sorts of authority to do things that are unethical. He may, for example, exercise the pardon power for corrupt reasons. But that doesn’t mean that lawyers acting at his direction are obligated to engage in conduct that they regard as unethical. On the contrary, they have a duty not to do so. So, for example, the pardon attorney at the Department of Justice might decide that he can’t process a corrupt pardon.
2. Sassoon makes clear in her letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that she firmly believes that “the case team conducted this investigation with integrity and that the charges against Adams are serious and supported by fact and law.” She rejects Bove’s notion that statements made by former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams after he left office taint the prosecution, and she obviously would find outrageous Bove’s escalated assertion in his reply that the prosecution was “politically motivated.”
3. Sassoon doesn’t believe that it is proper to drop charges against a public official in exchange for that public official’s agreeing to use his office to advance the policies of the Trump administration, or to use the threat of reinstating those charges to ensure the public official’s compliance with his agreement. I think that Sassoon is right on this point: How can Bove claim to be ending the “weaponization” of prosecutions when he is advancing a practice that would treat leniently public officials who promise to support the Trump administration’s policies and treat more harshly those who don’t?
But even if you think that Sassoon is wrong on this point, her position is certainly one that an intelligent person could hold in good faith. She has acted honorably in standing, and then resigning, on principle.
4. I’ll add here that I don’t understand Sassoon to have been maintaining that the federal district court could somehow compel the U.S. Attorney’s office to continue its prosecution of Adams. She was explaining why she couldn’t in good faith file a motion to dismiss the indictment, much less to do so without prejudice. She was also warning Attorney General Bondi that such a motion might backfire, by inviting a “rigorous inquiry” from the judge into the reasons for the motion.
Now that DOJ has filed the motion to dismiss, it will be interesting to see how federal district judge Dale Ho handles it. Perhaps he will have some questions to pose to Bove.