The Thursday Afternoon Massacre

A brave U.S. Attorney stood up for the rule of law, and it was a shot heard across the land.

Former Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon. Photo courtesy of the New York Times

There was a bloodbath over at the Justice Department, signaling real trouble ahead for the Trump administration.

In the first major challenge to Trump’s new Attorney General Pam Bondi, the resignation of acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, a top prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, set off a chain reaction that has shaken the Justice Department to its core.

The Department had been planning to drop all charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges and possible new obstruction of justice charges. Lately, Adams has been working hard to curry favor with the Trump White House, and it looked like his efforts were about to pay off.

Enter Sassoon, who was in charge of the Adams case. When she learned of the plan to dismiss all charges against Adams, she offered her resignation in a polite but damning letter. In it, she laid out why she could no longer in good faith work for the Department, which had put political considerations above the rule of law.

Sassoon wasn’t the only lawyer to quit the Department yesterday. When it tried to hand the case to the Public Integrity Section in D.C., its top lawyers resigned, too, rather than dismiss the charges against Adams. Then more lawyers followed. By the end, six attorneys had quit, dealing a stunning blow to the administration.

Normally we don’t get much of a view into the inner workings and politics of the Justice Department. They are usually quite tight lipped. But thanks to Sassoon, we now have a clear picture of what happened and why it’s so indicative not only of the corruption at the very top but also of the high levels of integrity throughout the rest of the Department.

The case against Eric Adams

I don’t want to add much digital ink to the long saga of New York City’s corrupt mayor, so I’ll quote Prof. Steve Vladeck’s summary of the case against Adams:

To make a very long story short, the 110th Mayor of the City of New York was indicted last year by federal prosecutors on one count of conspiracy to receive campaign contributions from foreign nationals and commit wire fraud and bribery; two counts of soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals; and one count of soliciting and accepting a bribe. In essence, the indictment claimed that Adams received more than $100,000 worth of free plane tickets and luxury hotel stays from wealthy Turkish nationals and at least one government official over the course of a decade.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, in his attempt to get out from under these very serious corruption charges, Mayor Adams traveled to kiss the ring of Donald Trump and see how the 47th president might help him stay out of prison. He had to work fast, because his trial was set to begin in April.

Adams told Trump that, like him, he was a “victim” of the weaponization of the Justice Department. (Not true.) He claimed that the Biden administration had targeted him because he was critical of its migrant policies. (Also not true.) Adams “praised parts of Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later,” according to the New York Times.

On Monday, Adams’s work seemed to have paid off. The No. 2 official at Justice, Emil Bove III, who served as Trump’s criminal defense counsel in his Manhattan criminal trial where his client was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, directed Sassoon to drop the case. Specifically, Bove directed her in a memo to cease all further investigations until her successor was confirmed by the Senate and could conduct a review after the mayoral election this November.

Bove’s main rationale for dismissing the case was a headspinner. He claimed the indictment “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Trump’s efforts to crack down on migrants and had “improperly interfered” with Adams’s re-election campaign. (If that sounds familiar, it’s essentially Trump’s long-held rationale for why charges against him were a “witch hunt” designed to create “election interference.”)

In other words, Bove provided only political justifications for dropping the charges, with no rationale related to the actual facts, evidence or law of the case. That memo made big news on Monday, and legal observers assumed, with a sinking feeling in our collective guts, that the matter was finished. Adams had played politics well, and Trump had bitten and apparently ordered his Justice Department to comply.

But as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo began to point out, by midweek no one had actually seen an actual motion to dismiss the charges.

Hmmm. Something clearly was up.

A letter for the ages

That something was an eight page letter penned by Sassoon and containing multiple citations to applicable law and an eyebrow raising footnote 1. It was addressed to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and it laid out Sassoon’s reasons for not wanting to dismiss the case against Adams. She offered her resignation if Bondi did not wish to meet with her or reconsider the directives of the Bove memo issued that Monday.

For the lawyers out there, I highly recommend a full read of the letter. You’ll want to stand up and cheer. For everyone else, the Cliff’s Notes version is this:

• Sassoon defended the decision to indict Adams and made a strong case for why the indictment was sound;

• She made a clear record of the fact that Adams’s lawyers (including Alex Spiro, who also has served as Elon Musk’s lawyer!) want an improper deal: political cooperation in exchange for a dismissal;

• She methodically destroyed the arguments Bove had set out in his memo for dismissing the charges; and

• She made clear that the order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.”

Her letter concluded, “I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department's priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record.”

Sassoon also knew that there were more charges beyond the pending corruption charges coming against Adams. They were planning to add a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I.,” she wrote. The charges would also have included additional accusations about his “participation in a straw donor scheme.”

Then there was Footnote 1, which is about as close to consciousness of guilt as you can get. Check it out, noting especially the final sentence:

1. I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. 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.

No notes at the meeting, folks! That would be bad, because… we did bad things!

It’s important to know something about Sassoon’s political leanings. She’s a conservative, Federalist Society attorney who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. So this is not some progressive or liberal, though I have no doubt that the MAGA ghouls will try to paint her that way. She was the lawyer the Department picked to head the Southern District of New York, an office so important and so aboveboard that it’s often referred to as the Sovereign District of New York.

Sassoon carried on that important tradition by refusing to debase herself and abandon her principles.

Bove fires back

Bove is a real piece of work, and he wasn’t going to let things go quietly. Whether Bondi instructed him to answer or he took it upon himself to do so, his letter responding to Sassoon blasted her personally and her handling of the case, along with her decision not to obey a direct order.

Bove didn’t just stop with her. He wrote that the other prosecutors on the case who had worked with her, and apparently supported her position, would be placed on administrative leave, too, for disobeying his command. He threatened them with an investigation by the AG and the Department’s internal investigative unit, both of which would also evaluate Sasson’s conduct, which could be taken as a veiled threat to bring bar disciplinary action. (Bove may want to think twice about this investigation now, as his own conduct might come under the microscope, and the judge overseeing the dismissal could demand some answers about what really went down.)

The most telling part of the letter was where Bove placed fealty to the President above all other considerations, including Sasson’s oath to uphold the Constitution. “In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” he wrote, “and anyone romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and the public’s perception of our efforts.”

Last I checked, the fact that the President is “duly elected” has no bearing on whether he is asking the Department to engage in unethical or illegal behavior, which Sasson was under a duty not to engage in.

The ensuing bloodbath

This is the point where things got really interesting. After Sassoon resigned, Bove sent the file over to the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department in D.C. There, he expected that the heads of the Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, would obey his order and dismiss the case.

Instead, they resigned as well.

Bove went to other lawyers down the line, including one who reportedly was in the hospital giving birth. The response was the same: We quit.

In all, there were six resignations, including Sassoon’s. This is twice the number of people who were sacked when President Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating Watergate. They had to go three officials down the line until they got to Robert Bork, who was unprincipled enough to order Cox’s firing. That series of dismissals became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and it soured the public badly against Nixon who was clearly trying to obstruct the investigation.

Political repercussions

The multiple resignations, especially by respected Department leaders in both New York and D.C., are reverberating across the nation, in the halls of Congress and in our courts. Bove is on a tear to try to reshape the entire Justice Department into a political weapon of the White House, trashing its historic independence from politics, and he just hit a major roadblock.

As I wrote in The Big Picture substack yesterday, many prosecutors at the Department are already demoralized and sickened as they watch their colleagues get hounded, put on leave or fired simply because they won’t play along with improper demands. Many employees are now on government lists merely for having worked on a single January 6 case. There are already lawsuits to stop wide purges of prosecutors. The plunge in morale has already had a deleterious effect on the Department’s ability to defend against the scores of lawsuits being filed by unions, nonprofits and blue state attorneys general to stop the illegal impoundment of federal funds and the takeover of critical computer systems by “DOGE.”

For Mayor Adams, the saga is not yet over. It isn’t clear whom they will ultimately find willing to dismiss the charges against him. And the judge on the case may want to take a closer look now at this dismissal, given how sketchy it appears.

Moreover, there is significant pressure now on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to exercise her power to remove Adams from office, especially now that there is unrefuted evidence that Adams sought leniency in exchange for throwing migrants in New York under the bus and letting ICE have free rein, in contravention to the city’s existing policies.

Indeed, shortly after Sassoon’s resignation on Thursday, following a meeting between Adams and Trump’s new border czar, Thomas Homan, Adams declared he would issue an order allowing ICE agents into the Rikers Island prison complex, signaling a stark departure from the city’s prior sanctuary status.

Through all of this, one thing is now crystal clear: This story has gone from a local case of mayoral corruption to a stunning and significant national case of embarrassment for the Justice Department. The resistance to the behavior of top officials, explosively displayed by the mass resignations of top Department lawyers on Thursday, spells real trouble for Bove and Bondi as they seek to bend the entire DOJ to the will of the Trump White House.