Blatant Corruption At The DOJ

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

The chaos continues under the second Trump administration, specifically in the Department of Justice. Last week, seven respected prosecutors resigned in protest after Deputy AG Emil Bove the third, who looks exactly like you would expect someone with that name to look like, Nosferatu, and not the new one, the original, after he ordered prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a case that had been under investigation for the better part of the last three years and resulted in a Grand Jury indictment and strong words from departing prosecutors who said they were confident in the evidence against the Mayor. The order for dismissal comes as Eric Adams has become ever cozier with Trump and is actively working to collaborate with ICE to crack down on immigrants in the largest city in the country. It also gives the DOJ and the President persuasive power over the Mayor, who is beholden to whatever they tell him to do, lest they decide to bring new charges against him. It’s the latest move in the Trump administration’s push to concentrate as much power in the hands of the President and squash any disloyal civil servants in the process. Separately, but also relatedly, Trump tweeted on Saturday that, quote “he who saves his country does not violate any law” and then pinned the tweet, indicating the President’s growing determination to accumulate power by whatever means necessary, the rule of law be damned. Today we’re going to get a grasp on the chaos and what this means for the DOJ and the rule of law going forward. Let’s get into it.

 

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Let’s set up the timeline of how this all unfolded to get a better understanding of how we got here and what’s really happened.

Since at least 2023, Democrat mayor Eric Adams has been under investigation by the DOJ for accepting illegal foreign donations and participating in quid pro quo agreements with the country of Turkey. In November, 2023, the FBI seized his electronic devices as part of this ongoing investigation. Last summer, a Grand Jury was called to investigate Eric Adams and determine whether an indictment was warranted. After being presented with testimony and evidence, the grand jury agreed the indictment was warranted and in September prosecutors in the Southern District of New York brought five federal criminal counts against Adams including for illegal campaign contributions, accepting gifts from foreign nationals, and for wire fraud. Eric Adams pled not guilty. His trial was scheduled to start in April, 2025.

Then, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Eric Adams was seen at an unscheduled appearance at a Madison Square Garden UFC fight alongside Trump and other Republican leaders a few days later. In December Adams had a closed door meeting with Trump’s named border czar Tom Homan, the same guy who thinks AOC should be penalized for explaining to immigrants what their rights are and thinks it’s really inconvenient that immigrants are able to avoid arrest because of being aware of said rights.

In early January it was revealed that prosecutors were continuing to investigate the Eric Adams case and would be potentially bringing new charges against him. Three days before Trump’s inauguration, Eric Adams traveled to Mar a Lago for a lil chat with the president-elect. On inauguration day, which was also MLK day, Adams canceled his appearances at two MLK events in New York City to instead go to DC for the inauguration.

That same day, Trump issued a flurry of directives and executive orders, including one titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Fed[1] eral Government” which ordered an end to the use of the DOJ to weaponize the federal government against the american people. As part of that order, the DOJ was tasked with identifying instances where the Biden administration politically targeted people for prosecution.

The next day Democrat mayor Eric Adams appears on Tucker Carlson’s show and claims that the case against him was retaliatory because of his criticisms of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. This despite the fact the investigation began and even the raid of his electronics in 2023 happened before he made any criticisms of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

At the end of January, Adams’ attorneys meet with federal prosecutors in Manhattan along with Emil Bove who is, by the way, in addition to being a Nosferatu lookalike, also formerly Trump’s defense attorney who worked on his New York hush money case, talk about a quid pro quo.

10 days later, on February 10th, Emil Bove issued an official directive on behalf of the DOJ to federal prosecutors in New York ordering them to dismiss the case against Eric Adams. The letter is 2 pages long and laid out zero legal arguments for why the case against Eric Adams was unfounded in law and should not move forward. In fact it explicitly says “The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based… this directive in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case.”  Instead, it gives two non-legal reasons why the case must be dismissed. First, because the timing of the charges interferes with Adam’s 2025 campaign for re-election. The charges were brought 9 months before the primary and over a year before the election itself. And the second reason is because the trial is getting in the way of Adams’ ability to devote time to fighting illegal immigration as ordered by the President. Emil Bove explicitly said the case should be dismissed without prejudice, meaning the case could be brought again at any time. This is an important point. In the letter he claims it is so that the US attorney can re-evaluate the case after the November 2025 mayoral election, but it also clearly creates explicit leverage. The DOJ has the power to make the charges, which have the potential for 20 years of jail time, go away, and they also have the power to bring them back, the insinuation being that they would do so if Eric Adams failed to deliver on promises related to implementing Trump’s agenda in New York City. So this letter was issued Feb. 10 and was a bombshell within the Justice department, because it’s so blatantly political and because it was directed at the Southern District of New York which is one of the most prestigious US attorneys offices in the country and one that prides itself on its independence from political motivations.

I worked briefly as an intern in law school for the US attorney’s office in Boston during Trump’s first term when Jeff Sessions was AG and Sessions issued all sorts of directives at prosecutors to be more aggressive prosecuting immigrants and drug charges, etc, and the US Attorney who sits at the head of the district and is appointed by the President tends to go along with whatever the AG’s policy initiatives are. These are political appointees, their work is inherently going to be influenced by the president. But the assistant US attorneys, the “line prosecutors” the ones who do the day to day prosecuting, exercise a lot of discretion, especially the more senior ones. So to have a directive to stop work on a specific case, and one that is so clearly politically motivated and pushes line prosecutors to halt their work on a case that they believe is winnable and supported by the facts, is a dramatic move.

Even more dramatic, two days later, on February 12th, the acting US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, wrote a strongly worded letter to AG Pam Bondi raising her concerns with the directive and asking for a meeting with Bondi to discuss further. In the 10 page letter, which I have linked along with all my other sources in the description, she says quote “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.” She alleges an explicit quid pro quo agreement between the DOJ and Eric Adams, defends the timing of the charges, saying “I am not aware of any instance in which the Department has concluded that an indictment brought this far in advance of an election is improper.”

She concludes that if Bondi is unwilling to meet or to reconsider, she is prepared to offer her resignation. This letter, too, is a bombshell. It is rare for a US attorney to openly oppose orders from the AG’s office and to accuse the AG of quid pro quo agreements and improperly politically influencing the judicial process. It is also a bombshell because Danielle Sassoon is not some bleeding heart liberal making a political statement in her resignation. Danielle Sassoon was appointed to her post as interim US attorney for the southern district of New York by Donald Trump himself just three weeks before her resignation. She is a card carrying Republican. She got her BA from Harvard and her JD from Yale. She is a member of the far right Federalist Society. She clerked for ANTONIN SCALIA for god’s sake. She is an example once more of lawyers I have been talking about for the last few weeks, lawyers and judges who are increasingly becoming the final frail protection against a full blown constitutional crisis in this country, because there are lawyers and judges out there, and lots of them, who are incredibly smart and incredibly dedicated to attempting to ethically apply the rule of law. I always say no one is unbiased, and these judges and lawyers are included, but one thing you learn in law school, in addition to ethics, is how to zealously advocate for your client despite your personal opinions on the matter. You owe them a duty of care as their lawyer, and you are ethically bound to do whatever you can, again within the bounds of ethics and the law, to advocate for your client. For prosecutors, their client is the US government, the constitution, and the law. And by “US government” I don’t mean the President. The president is not the client of US prosecutors. The fair and ethical application and enforcement of the laws of the United States is their duty.

Now that’s not to say there aren’t fair criticisms to be lobbed at prosecutors, many of them zealously advocate for the US government by attempting to put as many people behind bars for decades for low level drug offenses, or by locking up immigrants, many of them do let their biases and personal prejudices determine how aggressively they prosecute or do not prosecute certain cases. So please by all means, you can criticize prosecutors. There are many prosecutors who themselves criticize prosecutors. During my brief time at the US attorneys office in Boston it was quickly apparent that certain prosecutors were widely known to be conservative law and order types hell bent on locking up as many black and brown people as possible, while others were liberals interested in making change from the inside. My supervising attorney was, I shit you not, my favorite person I’ve ever worked for. He was a lovely human being. He worked in the securities and financial fraud division because it was an area of practice where he’d be targeting mostly white dudes who stole money from people and ruined their lives. Before that he worked to prosecute child predators. Every Wednesday he was gone during lunch to lead a book club at a local prison, because he strongly believed that if you were in the business of sending people to prison you better have a deep understanding of the place you are sending them. He was certainly a diamond in the rough, and there were prosecutors there who I hated because they refused to work with any intern that wasn’t from Harvard and didn’t even bother to learn my name. Anyway, I think it’s easy especially on the left to blanket write-off prosecutors as “cops” and I think the criticism is fair in many instances, but it’s not so black and white, and I am glad that there are people whose work it is to enforce the laws that I do agree with, and that some of those people operate by putting ethics and integrity above personal beliefs as much as possible.

ANYWAY, let’s get back to the story.

The day after Danielle Sassoon’s bombshell letter, on February 13th, she tendered her resignation, along with five other assistant US attorneys working on the Adams case. This is one of the largest mass resignation events in recent memory at the DOJ. Landing a job as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York is a DREAM job for many attorneys, it is incredibly prestigious and highly coveted. And so for that many people to walk away from the job in protest is a big deal. Because it’s not like they could have stayed and fought–they were being threatened with firing, the case was likely going to be transferred, and even if no one agreed to file a motion to dismiss the case, the official administration stance on it is that the case should be dismissed, and so even if it is not officially dismissed the prosecution will not do anything to move it forward, and eventually Eric Adams could move to dismiss on speedy trial grounds–its a violation of his rights to drag out a case forever by not doing anything. So by resigning en masse, they knew the media would report on it, hi yes they were right, and that it would be a major shake up in the district that would take time to fill and would make a major statement against the policies of the DOJ. And especially so because this was most publicly coming from someone APPOINTED BY Trump who is a long time Republican with deep Republican ties.

The same day as the mass resignation, Emil Bove the third responded in a very snotty 8 page letter that indicated clearly the lip service he paid in his first letter three days before about how he doesn’t question the integrity of the prosecutors on the case has gone out the fuckin window. He admonished Danielle Sassoon, who is a 38 year old woman I might add and I think, as a woman in law, I need to point out that context in light of the tone he takes in this letter. It is very much giving “sit down little girl” and you can tell he relished in his attempt to tear her to shreds. He says, quote, “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.” This despite the fact that Danielle Sassoon’s oath as a US attorney pledged loyalty to upholding the laws and the constitution, not the will of Donald Trump. And he informed her that the assistant US attorneys in charge of prosecuting the Eric Adams case are being placed on off-duty, administrative leave, pending investigations by the office of the AG, and she would be included in those investigations. He accused her of vast insubordination for questioning the chain of command, and then basically told her point by point why she’s a dummy and her arguments are dumb. It was an incredibly pointed and personal letter that was clearly meant to make her feel Very Bad and like she had broken the rules and angered father. It was an incredibly inappropriate tone for a DOJ official to take with a US Attorney, but propriety and niceties are clearly out the window.

That was further evidenced the next day when the lead prosecutor on the Eric Adams case, Attorney Hagan Scotten, issued his own resignation letter to Emil Bove the third. I’m gonna read the whole thing because it’s less than a page and very good.

Mr. Bove, I have received correspondence indicating that I refused your order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment.  That is not exactly correct.  The U.S. Attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, never asked me to file such a motion, and I therefore never had an opportunity to refuse.  But I am entirely in agreement with her decision not to do so, for the reasons stated in her February 12, 2025 letter to the Attorney General. In short, the first justification for the motion—that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys—is so weak as to be transparently pretextual.  The second justification is worse.  No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives. 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. Please consider this my resignation.  It has been an honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Yours truly, Hagan Scotten

Again, like Danielle Sassoon, Hagan Scotten is not a bleeding heart liberal making a move in political protest. Based on that letter, he does not have negative views of the Trump administration. He probably voted for the guy. Scotten is an Army veteran who served in Iraq as a special forces troop commander for which he earned two bronze medals. He went to Harvard law school and then went on to clerk for Bret Kavanaugh back before he was on the Supreme Court and for Chief Justice John Roberts. This man is not throwing away a coveted career as a prosecutor over a political statement. He’s doing so because he believes it fundamentally goes against ethics and the rule of law. And, again, you can say anything you want about what his personal beliefs might be and the ethics of being a prosecutor in the first place, but you have to admit that having these highly publicized bombshells dropped from two well-respected avowed conservative prosecutors is very powerful. It is rare to see the right criticize the right.

The mass resignation of DOJ officials has been compared to the Saturday Night Massacre, which I think is apt. That was when Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor that had been appointed to lead the investigation into the Watergate scandal. His AG refused and resigned. He then ordered his Deputy AG to do it, who also refused and resigned. Finally the line of succession came to Robert Bork, who agreed, and did the deed. He was later nominated to a spot on the Supreme Court by none other than Ronald Fuckin Reagan, but the nomination fell through, and now his unfortunate last name and legacy is forever tied to being enough of a coward to comply with the demands of a megalomaniac executive. And may that fate also befall the name Emil Bove the third.

And ever since Watergate, we have been especially concerned with the President’s control and sway over the DOJ. A single megalomaniac at the helm should not be able to wield prosecutors to do his bidding, in large part because prosecutors SHOULD be driven by ethics and law and not beholden to political whims. That’s the point. That’s an important separation that Trump and the people pulling the strings in the background are explicitly trying to do away with by wrangling in the entirety of the executive branch, including the DOJ and all other federal agencies, getting rid of career civil servants in order to replace them with Trump’s henchmen who will unquestioningly do his bidding, ethics rules and laws be damned. Emil Bove is setting a great example of that.

The filing of the motion to dismiss, which finally did happen on Friday evening, was apparently forced through by a call with Emil Bove in which he told prosecutors in the Justice Department’s public integrity section, the ones who hadn’t resigned at least, that they had one hour to pick two people to sign the motion to dismiss, saying those who did so could be promoted. Seems this man loves a quid pro quo. According to reporting from AP, after the call the entire group decided they would resign rather than sign anything, but Edward Sullivan, a veteran prosecutor, stepped up to sign the motion because he was “concerned for the jobs of the younger people in the unit.”

In that motion to dismiss, Emil Bove argued dismissal was necessary not because of the merit of the case, but because continuing to prosecute him would get in the way of his ability to govern and pose “unacceptable threats to public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.” And op, what’s that? If you’ve been tuning into my show for long you know our ears have to perk up when we hear “national security” as justification for an official act that seems incredibly unjust or, at the very least, fishy as hell. Protecting “national security” is a convenient fallback argument when the actual law and legal ethics don’t support what you’re doing. It was used as justification to round up Japanese Americans and place them in concentration camps on US soil during World War 2, with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. It’s being used now to actively deny due process rights to immigrants, illegal and otherwise, in this country. And it’s now being used to justify a quid pro quo agreement with a public official credibly accused of extensive corruption in order to influence his actions and force him to bend to the will of the President (ALLEGEDLY). Claims of “national security threats” rarely come with extensive proof, because of course sharing that proof would also be a national security threat, and so it’s a “just take my word for it” fearmongering argument that works wonders in our justice system. When you hear “national security threat” as an explanation for fishy legal behavior, you should always question that.

Eric Adams for his part has vowed not to resign and is cooperating with the feds to open Rikers Island for ICE. He claims there was absolutely no quid pro quo with the government, despite his appearance on Fox and Friends Friday morning with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan who literally said, and I quote “"If he doesn’t come through, I'll be back in New York City and we won't be sitting on the couch. I'll be in his office, up his butt saying, 'Where the hell is the agreement we came to?'"

The judge on the case, Judge Ho, still needs to issue a ruling on the motion to dismiss, and Danielle Sassoon in her letter to Pam Bondi laid out compelling legal arguments as to why he should not grant the motion to dismiss, even though judges typically grant them when brought by prosecutors who brought the case in the first place. But as I said, no matter what the judge decides the case is dead in the water if the prosecutors assigned to it are not actively pursuing it. The only way it will be revived is if Eric Adams gets on Trump’s bad side and his DOJ decides to revive the case in retaliation. For now, having that anvil hanging over Eric Adams’ head makes him a very easy pawn for Trump to play with in the largest city in the country, so you better bet there will be incredible amounts of money spent to get Eric Adams re-elected this year.

Going forward this latest chaos indicates the lengths to which Trump and his lackeys are willing to go to aggressively mold the tentacles of government to conform with their will. They will quid pro quo and then claim there’s none. They will ignore the rule of law when it suits them and send sniveling nosferatu lookin former defense attorneys to invent arguments that are flimsy at best but said with authority. And Trump will look on in passive approval, with a pinned tweet saying “he who saves his country does not violate any law.” Because anything can be justified if you just lie about it enough.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last Wednesday where I discuss all the creeps and dweebs doing Elon’s bidding in DOGE.

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