Anti-social media is full of the usual stream of attacks on anyone who has the integrity to stand up against anything the Trump administration does. Most of the attacks are of the caliber of “Danielle Sassoon was hired by Preet Bharara, so we know she’s bad.” Just wait until they find out that Bharara also hired Emil Bove (and every other prosecutor who joined his office during the eight years he ran it). And if Sassoon were suspect, why did Bove and the Department of Justice handpick her to be interim United States Attorney?
I’m going to ignore all the rest of the inanities and instead address in this post three actual arguments, two against Sassoon and one in favor, all of which I regard as seriously flawed.
1. One argument that I’ve run across is that dismissing the indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams is no different than lots of other plea bargains the executive branch enters into. As one reader puts it to me:
It’s perfectly fine for the executive branch to choose to drop a prosecution in order to induce the defendant to engage in conduct that the executive branch views as more beneficial to the public interest than throwing the defendant in jail. That’s what happens, for example, whenever the government conditions a plea bargain on a defendant doing things like serving as a confidential informant or providing information about where the proceeds of crimes are located.
I don’t think that the analogy holds at all. As I stated in my post yesterday, I think Sassoon is right that it is not 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, nor is it proper to drop those charges without prejudice (i.e., subject to being reinstated) in order to exert leverage over how that public official carries out his duties. 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? In short, the extension of the logic of plea-bargain conditions into the realm of compliant policy actions by public officials is very much the politicization of criminal justice.
(And again, 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.)
2. If I’m understanding him correctly, Josh Blackman argues that the federal prosecutors in the Adams case adopted too expansive a view of federal anti-corruption laws—or at least that the divide over Sassoon’s refusal to follow Bove’s directive reflects “two very different conceptions of the federal criminal justice system.”
I think that Blackman’s argument has zero bearing on this matter. Bove’s directive explicitly does not rest on any “assess[ment] of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Indeed, he states that “these are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office at this time.” So even if I assume arguendo that the indictment of Adams rests on an overly expansive reading of federal anti-corruption laws, that would not affect at all my judgment of the dispute between Bove and Sassoon. (Bove does belatedly toss into his February 13 letter—the letter in which he accepts Sassoon’s resignation—“concerns” that the “case turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, “extremely aggressive.”)
I also strongly suspect that Sassoon would have complied with a request to move to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the Trump administration was adopting a narrower view of the anti-corruption laws or giving their enforcement lower priority. If that were the ground, there would of course have been no reason to move to dismiss without prejudice. (I of course can’t prove that Sassoon would have complied with such a request. But if you’re somehow certain that the Trump administration picked as interim United States Attorney someone who had no interest in the challenge and rewards of running the office and who was just looking for an excuse to resign, then you must hold a very low view of its level of competence.)
3. In today’s New York Times, former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman writes in defense of Sassoon’s rejection of Bove’s “two transparently inappropriate reasons.” Unfortunately, he goes on for several paragraphs to tout the “independence” of the “Southern District” (shorthand for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York) from oversight by Main Justice.
My own view is that the Southern District, like every other U.S. Attorney’s office, answers to the Attorney General. There is nothing in Sassoon’s conduct or letter that indicates that she believes otherwise or that she shares Richman’s inflated view of the office. Indeed, Sassoon wrote to Attorney General Bondi precisely in order to ensure that Bondi was fully informed of the matter, and her offer to resign was very much the act of someone who recognizes that she is a subordinate.