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.
Sassoon’s refusal followed a long, strange courtship between Adams, a Democrat who not so long ago called himself the “Biden of Brooklyn,” and Trump, who lately evinces fellow-feeling for any politician facing corruption charges, and who clearly saw an opportunity to neutralize the Mayor of his home town. The pair’s entwinement involves William Burck, one of Adams’s lawyers, who was recently named an “outside ethics adviser” to the Trump Organization. On Monday, one of Trump’s criminal-defense attorneys, Emil Bove III, now newly installed as the President’s “enforcer” at the Justice Department, sent a memo to Sassoon directing her to put the Adams case on ice. In exchange for Adams’s coöperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown, Bove’s memo said, the Justice Department was prepared to endorse the Mayor’s unsubstantiated theory of the case against him: that it was a politically motivated prosecution provoked by his criticism of former President Joe Biden’s border policies. “It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior Administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed,” Bove wrote. “There shall be no further targeting of Mayor Adams.”
Adams gratefully accepted this dubious gift. “Now we can put this cruel episode behind us,” he said on Tuesday, in a brief live-streamed victory speech. He declared himself exonerated. “I never broke the law, and I never would.” Even some of the Mayor’s staunchest allies couldn’t believe it. “It certainly sounds like President Trump is holding the Mayor hostage,” the Reverend Al Sharpton said. Trump Administration officials did little to dispel the hostage theory. “I’m coming up there Thursday to meet with the Mayor—either he comes to the table or we go around him,” Tom Homan, the President’s “border czar,” said during a radio interview. On Thursday, Adams announced that he was loosening the rules around ICE operations on Rikers Island, the city’s giant jail complex. “I want to work with the new federal administration, not war with them,” he said.
But the plan was predicated on everyone going along with it. And, as the days passed this week, and the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan made no move to officially shelve the Adams case, it became increasingly apparent that the Justice Department had some dissension in its ranks.