Danielle Sassoon, acting acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned rather than be complicit in Trump’s demand that she drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.
You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.
Following her resignation, six other career federal prosecutors in that same office have resigned in the Southern District of New York because they too refused to drop corruption charges against Adams, as ordered of Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump.
The seventh sent off a powerful resignation letter.
Eric Adams line prosecutor Hagan Scotten, submitting his resignation rather than filing "dismissal-with-leverage" motion:
"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."
Via… pic.twitter.com/941vGrJzYs
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) February 14, 2025
The kicker is at the end.
There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. 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. [My italics. – MS]
Finally, another prosecutor finally agreed to drop the charges to save his colleagues from further coercion.
The prosecutor acquiesced to file the motion in an attempt to spare other career staff from potentially being fired by Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. The news agency named the lawyer as Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department’s public integrity section of 30 attorneys, two sources said, after his team was given an hour by Bove to decide between them who would file the motion.
“This is not a capitulation – this is a coercion,” one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.” The whole section had reportedly discussed resigning en masse.
We will see this repeated all over the country in all the agencies.
It appears, though, that the judge is allowed to reject the dismissal. There’s this from Sassoon’s original letter:
Also, I have read the the Governor of New York has the power to fire the Mayor of New York. Wouldn’t that be sweet? And I suspect that the State of New York has the ability to file its own charges. We are going to have to rely on certain states to get us through this.
Wow, another Saturday Night Massacre!
ahcuah,
Yes the governor can and is supposedly thinking about it.There is also another way of removing him.
Given that Trump’s unilateral “solution” to the war in Ukraine is “surrender”, I feel the word “cowards” doesn’t appear high enough or often enough in that list. And that government reflects accurately the nation that elected it.
sonof: “And that government reflects accurately the nation that elected it.”
Uh, because all nations are monoliths containing like-thinking people? In that case, it’s comparable to say that you’re partly responsible for Brexit and The Troubles.
Look, from your recent comments it’s obvious that you don’t like the USA or its inhabitants, and certainly there are plenty of things that our government has done that deserve condemnation, but there’s a word for blind, blanket pronouncements against large groups of people, and I suspect you’re better than that.
So…these prosecutors are falling on their proverbial swords in order to spare others a similar fate? Is that how others read this? I guess if the alternative was for a mass firing, that would make some sense. My concern when I first heard this news was that resigning just allows Trump to appoint more obedient lackies in their place. But if they were not only going to otherwise be fired, but others would have been fired as well, it perhaps slows down Trump’s takeover. And so perhaps this is the better alternative? I guess I don’t like it either way.
No… but the President not only won the electoral college but also the popular vote, his party has a majority in the Senate AND the House. I’ll readily concede that there are probably some non-cowards in the USA, but the opposite side are not merely there, they’re winning, repeatedly. Parents lie to children (mine did to me) that bullies don’t prosper and if you stand up to them they’ll back down. Bitter experience taught me neither of those things are true. The USA stood up to fascism 80 years ago. That generation must be turning in their graves, ashamed of the generations that followed them.
Brexit, I’ll take. I didn’t do enough to stop it, and I could have done more. Like a lot of people, it didn’t really occur to me that this country would be so monumentally fucking stupid as to vote Leave. More than that, it never occurred to me that David Cameron -- who had explicitly set up the referendum as advisory only with no obligation on the government to do ANYTHING with a Leave vote, let alone a close-run one -- would be so spineless and irresponsible as to resign immediately and leave the country in the hands of the morons who campaigned to leave. I was complacent, and that complacency has cost me greatly, and will cost my children more. I’ll own that.
The Troubles reach back well over 100 years, some would say several hundred, and in any case their modern manifestation reaches back to around the time I was busy being born. I’ll happily take the credit for electing the government that ended them.
Yeah, your problem with that is that I’m anything but blind here. My eyes are wide open and working fine. I’m not making a blanket pronouncement from a position of ignorance, which is generally the root of racism (I’m assuming that’s the word you mean, and let’s leave aside that if “American” was one race there’d be a lot less trouble there). I’m making a judgement based on facts, to a situation that is real and developing. I heartily condemn the actions of the elected government of Israel, and they do their best to weaponise the charge of racism when they are so condemned. Don’t be trying to pull that disingenuous bullshit in defence of the ludicrously-more-racially-diverse USA.
Thank you. I try to be.
sonof: “the President not only won the electoral college but also the popular vote, his party has a majority in the Senate AND the House”
By now, pretty much everyone who has been paying attention to US politics understands that the Electoral College is a sham. It is a structural weakness that thwarts the will of the majority (see 2000 and 2016 presidential elections). Further, its weight is distorted (as is the composition of the US Senate) by certain demographic factors that have nothing to do with majority opinion, namely the fact that a large number of conservative leaning states are also low population states, yet each state gets two senators. This leads to the decidedly undemocratic result of Wyoming (population under 600,00) having equal representation to California (population of nearly 40 million). At the same time, Washington, DC, with a population of nearly 700,000 has no senators. In case you’re not aware, each state gets a certain number of Electoral College votes which is equal to the sum of their number of senators and House representatives. This means that very conservative Wyoming gets more than one vote per 200,000 inhabitants while liberal California gets less than one vote per 700,000 inhabitants. A further consequence is that although the US Senate is now majority Republican, those senators represent less than half of the country.
Second, Trump won a plurality, not a majority. He did not clear 50%. Further, election turnouts in the US historically are low, with only two thirds of potential voters casting votes for president. Thus, Trump won the explicit support of about one-third of the population. Nothing new here as even presidents who receive an overwhelming victory (which Trump clearly did not) seldom crack 50% of available votes.
But this is all academic. I freely admit that Trump is the duly elected president. My argument is against declaring that the entire country and its population are at fault for the outcome and are therefore deserving of sweeping denigration. A great many people did what they could to elect the sane person. Sorry, but we each don’t have $250 million to throw behind a candidate. And it’s not as if literally millions of Americans aren’t aware of the structural problems in our system and haven’t been trying to change it. Blanket derision in this case is not racism, as you assumed I meant. Bigotry would be a more accurate word.
TL,DR: A nation’s government should not be assumed to represent the will of all of its people (or in this case, even a hard majority).
I’ve said all I care to say on this topic.
@8 jimf
You are being way too generous to your fellow countrymen. the same argument applies the other way around, and is actually more appropriate. Less than 1/3 of americans voted against Trump, and so we can conclude that he has the active support of roughly 1/3 of voters, and the implicit support of an additional 1/3 of voters who didn’t think it was worth voting against him, ie they are indfferent to what he is doing.
The lack of organized resistance to the wholesale destruction of the US government is a a sign that the US is quite content to go down this path. It has been a couple of weeks now since he started the rampage, and spots of resistance are few, and muted.
Sure, it’s not fair to say that all americans approve, but it’s pretty clear a significant majority are in favour of Trumps actions. It’s a clear signal that the USA is welcoming a return to a world order in which “might makes right” applies, rather than a set of internationally accepted rules (or domestically agreed rules within the US).
… a government of crooks, fools, and cowards
An entirely unfair characterization: you left out the bigots and fanatics!
@9 canadiansteve:
In my experience, it is never safe to assume that non-voters in the USA are “OK” with the candidates. As an advocate of voting, people have expressed to me multiple reasons for not voting. A short list includes: They don’t like any of the candidates and will not vote for the “lesser evil”; They feel that their single vote is statistically worthless; It is difficult for them to vote (time, travel, other restrictions); They feel the selection process/party system is corrupt and a vote would signify their acceptance of it; Apathy, because they don’t believe that the outcome will affect them (either positively or negatively). None of those things should be construed as signalling that the individual is “OK” with one or more of the candidates. Much of it appears to come down to a feeling of powerlessness, and they are not happy, and certainly not “OK” with any of it. Indeed, “disgusted” is a word I often hear.
@jimf
I realize that for some people it can be very difficult to vote, and that’s a problem that should be addressed, but for the rest of the described reasons you give I would say that is acceptance of Trump as a reasonable candidate. Refusal to vote because it’s a lesser evil, or feeling that it has no effect when that’s the one time you can make a difference are both indications they are perfectly fine with Trump. That’s exactly why I say he has the implicit support of these voters. They had their chance, and they didn’t choose to vote against Trump -- this means they are complicit.