In an act of courage and integrity, Danielle Sassoon, Donald Trump’s own hand-picked interim United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned yesterday over acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s insistence that she move to dismiss without prejudice the pending criminal charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. For fuller background on the matter, I encourage you to read Andy McCarthy’s excellent Corner post yesterday.
Here I will offer some observations on the remarkable exchange between Bove and Sassoon: Bove’s February 10 directive to Sassoon, Sassoon’s February 12 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Bove’s February 13 reply.
1. Bove asserts in his February 13 reply that the prosecution of Adams was “politically motivated.” But that assertion is a huge leap from his assessment three days earlier, and he provides nothing to support that leap.
In his February 10 missive, Bove explicitly states that he has reached the decision to direct Sassoon to dismiss the case “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office at this time.” He further affirms that his directive “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case.”
Bove explains as his first reason for his decision that “the timing of the charges [against Adams] and more recent public actions by the former U.S. Attorney responsible for initiating the case [Damian Williams] have threatened the integrity of the proceedings, including by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that risks impacting potential witnesses and the jury pool.” Williams’s “public actions” after leaving his position as Attorney General have “created appearances of impropriety.” (Emphasis added.)
Sassoon responds that the “generalized concerns expressed by Mr. Bove are not a basis to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury, at least where, as here, the Government has no doubt in its evidence or the integrity of its investigation.” Further, “Williams’s role in the investigation and oversight of this case was even more minimal than I had assumed”:
The investigation began before Mr. Williams took office, he did not manage the day-to-day investigation, and the charges in this case were recommended or approved by four experienced career prosecutors, the Chiefs of the SDNY Public Corruption Unit, and career prosecutors at the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department. Mr. Williams’s decision to ratify their recommendations does not taint the charging decision. And notably, Adams has not brought a vindictive or selective prosecution motion, nor would one be successful.
Rather than answer or dispute Sassoon’s points, Bove concocts his ill-founded claim that the prosecution was “politically motivated.”
2. In his very next sentence, Bove tells Sassoon:
You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.
Further on, Bove flatly asserts that Sassoon has “violated [her] oath[] by failing to” file the dismissal motion.
Bove’s assertion is ridiculous. Sassoon is exercising her responsibility to provide the Attorney General her best advice on the matter and is offering to resign. She is doing exactly what any executive-branch official should do when she believes that she is being directed to take an action that is unethical or unconstitutional. There is no conceivable violation of her oath of office in such a course of conduct.
I don’t know what Bove means when he states that Sassoon is “suggesting that [she] retain[s] discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies” of the Trump administration. Bove would seem to be asserting that every executive-branch official needs to deem the policies of the president and the Attorney General to be constitutional. That would be an extraordinary claim.
Bove three times accuses Sassoon of “insubordination,” as though she had no authority to make sure that the Attorney General was fully informed of Sassoon’s views on Bove’s directive. He even asserts:
It is not for local federal officials such as yourself, who lack access to all relevant information, to question these judgments within the Justice Department’s chain of command.
3. Why would any talented attorney—anyone other than a “fool” or a “coward” (to borrow from the resignation letter of lead Adams prosecutor Hagan Scotten)—want to work in a Justice Department run by the likes of Bove?