The chaos and drama that unfolded on Thursday at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York as a result of the Trump Justice Department's order to dismiss the charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams may have just thrown a monkey wrench in the whole plan to do it, Lawfare editor Roger Parloff wrote on X.
Senior Justice Department official Emil Bove ordered the dismissal of charges against Adams, who faces a federal corruption case alleging he accepted $100,000 in illegal gifts from people connected to the Turkish government. Before this, the mayor spent weeks ingratiating himself to Trump, even visiting him at Mar-a-Lago, and committed far more than any other big-city Democratic mayor to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out Trump's mass deportation operations.
All of this, combined with Bove's remark that the prosecution could theoretically disrupt ICE operations, led many observers to suspect a quid pro quo arrangement between the Trump administration and the mayor.
Tensions exploded on Thursday when acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, a conservative Republican installed by Trump himself, resigned rather than follow the order to dismiss the charges. Bove reacted with a furious letter accusing her of insubordination, which kicked off a chain reaction that led to half a dozen more prosecutor resignations.
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According to ABC News' Katherine Faulders, officials inside the DOJ are already dubbing it the "Thursday Afternoon Massacre" — a reference to the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" where high-ranking DOJ officials resigned rather than follow former President Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate case that led to himself.
But according to Parloff, the upshot of all this may be that the Trump administration can't so easily dismiss the case against Adams — because what Sassoon has already stated in her message to her DOJ superiors is enough for a federal judge to reject the dismissal.
"The Sassoon letter will also make it hard for a judge to accept any motion to dismiss Mayor Adams's case. She furnishes not only the scummy backdrop to the deal, but the legal precedent for rejecting it," wrote Parloff.
In particular, Sassoon wrote that any court is unlikely to "find that such an improper exchange" of dismissal of federal charges for compliance with an administration's policy goals "is consistent with the public interest." She noted that past federal court precedent already cites "a prosecutor's acceptance of a bribe as a clear example of a dismissal that should not be granted as contrary to the public interest."