Live Updates: Upheaval Spreads Over Adams Case as Calls for His Resignation Grow
The lead federal prosecutor on the case against Mayor Eric Adams quit on Friday, the latest in a series of resignations over an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption charges the mayor faces.
"Mayor Eric Adams of New York faced increasingly loud calls to resign Friday, one day after a fuller picture of the arrangement that led to the U.S. Justice Department seeking to drop corruption charges against him began to emerge.
The revelations came in part from the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, who resigned rather than heed an order from Justice Department officials in Washington to drop the case. She accused Mr. Adams’s lawyers of negotiating for a dismissal in exchange for the mayor’s help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Tiffany Cabán, a councilwoman from Queens who represents Rikers Island, criticized Adams for saying he would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents back into the jail complex. A majority of people held there have yet to be convicted.
Adams’s decision is in line with the Trump administration’s fear-mongering about “dangerous, violent, criminal” immigrants, she said. “What we’re going to see is the most vulnerable people, who have been charged with crimes borne of poverty, sent back to the places where they are most in danger,” Cabán said.
New York Police Department officials said in a statement on Friday that their policies on immigration enforcement had not changed since Adams said he would issue an executive order permitting ICE agents in city jails.
“In accordance with New York City and State law, the NYPD does not engage in civil immigration enforcement, period,” the department said. It “does engage in criminal enforcement matters, as it always has, regardless of a person’s immigration status, including work on federal criminal task forces.”
Reporting from Washington
The current crisis at the Justice Department over the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York stems partly from the particulars of the law and a recent decree from Attorney General Pam Bondi.
In recent days, the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, has demanded that career lawyers submit a court filing in New York requesting to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams.
The acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the case against Adams on Monday. That we are now approaching noon on Friday and no federal prosecutor has yet complied is a sign of the remarkable upheaval raging within the department.
Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, resigned after Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of charges he had helped bring, suggesting that only a “fool” or a “coward” would obey.
In an undated, scathing resignation letter, Mr. Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.”
On Friday morning, Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, stepped up his pressure campaign. Bove held a group discussion with the entire public integrity section, roughly two dozen lawyers after Thursday’s resignations, looking for someone to sign a court document seeking dismissal of the charges against Adams, according to people familiar with the matter. The prospect of immediate resignations or firings hangs over every conversation about the issue.
Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who is running for mayor against Eric Adams, called the mayor’s interview on Fox News a “hostage situation” and said on social media: “The president sees this mayor as a pawn…as an open-door opportunity to use New York City as the proving ground for mass deportations, for federal overreach, for a strategy that prioritizes headlines, cruelty, and chaos over public safety.”
Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor against Adams, said on social media on Friday that the mayor’s interview alongside Trump’s border czar on Fox News was “sad, embarrassing, and enraging. It’s time for this mayor to go.”
While there are growing calls for Adams to resign, there are also calls for Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove him from office. Ana MarÃa Archila, co-director of the New York Working Families Party, said the governor had a responsibility to protect the city because Adams had “relinquished his responsibilities” to New Yorkers.
“In some ways this is not about Adams, it’s about how will we keep our people safe from the abuses of a tyrant,” Archila said. “Seeking the removal of the mayor might be the right thing to do.”
The mayor’s appearance on “Fox and Friends,” President Trump’s favorite morning show, was more than symbolic. It came a day after Adams said he would issue an executive order to allow ICE into the Rikers Island jail complex, a priority of Mr. Trump’s border czar.
Adams had not released the language of the executive order as of Friday morning. But the announcement quickly raised concerns among the Democratic leaders of the City Council, including Speaker Adrienne Adams, who framed the order as a possible favor for Trump and a potential subversion of the city’s sanctuary laws.
If the federal case against Adams is dismissed, it would be an uphill battle for any state prosecutor to pursue similar charges. Attention could shift to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has indicted members of Adams’s circle and won a criminal convictionof President Trump last year. However, to build a case against Adams for the same crimes, it would likely take the cooperation of federal prosecutors in the Department of Justice, which would be unlikely at this juncture. Other avenues to prosecuting Adams would also be challenging.
It is important to keep in mind how extraordinary these protest resignations are — of a sitting U.S. attorney, an assistant who has led the case against a high-profile elected official like the mayor, and of Justice Department lawyers in Washington who oversee corruption matters. Normally, the men and women who represent the government of the United States in federal court keep a low profile. They seldom draw attention to themselves. But this is a stunning clash between the Justice Department in Washington and the nation’s premier federal prosecutor’s office.
Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who is running for mayor against Adams, said of the mayor’s friendly interview on “Fox and Friends” with President Trump’s border czar: “I’d say we’ve become a national joke with how embarrassing this is, but unfortunately none of this is funny. The greatest city in the world is being humiliated daily because Adams is compromised.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a longtime critic of Adams, called on him to resign or be removed in response to Danielle Sassoon’s letter: “This is explosive. Mayor Adams is putting the City of New York and its people at risk in exchange for escaping charges. As long as Trump wields this leverage over Adams, the city is endangered. We cannot be governed under coercion. If Adams won’t resign, he must be removed.”
Hagan Scotten, a conservative Republican who led the investigation into Mayor Eric Adams since its inception in mid-2021 and headed the team that was preparing for the mayor’s April trial, alluded to his own political views in his resignation letter on Friday.
“Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new administration,” he wrote. “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 such arrangement would be contrary to the law, he wrote.
Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a Special Forces officer, graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John R. Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court. In his scathing resignation letter, he expresses disdain for the justifications Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official, presented for dismissing the case, including some involving U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.
“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 letter says.
The second justification, Scotten writes, was 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.”
The lead prosecutor on the Adams investigation has resigned from the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan rather than agree to file a motion seeking to dismiss the corruption case against the mayor. In his resignation letter, Hagan Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.” He added: “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.”
There have been no resignations at City Hall yet, but in recent hours, staff members there have expressed anger and disbelief at the state of the mayoralty.
Not long after his appearance on “Fox and Friends” with the Trump administration’s border czar, Mayor Eric Adams sent out his weekly email to New York City residents with the subject line “time to move forward.” He quickly mentioned that “the U.S. Department of Justice directed that the case against me be dismissed” before trying to convey a sense of normalcy, laying out his administration’s efforts at addressing crime, affordable housing and early childhood education.
Some have called on Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove Mayor Eric Adams from office. She has previously suggested that she would not oust him, but did not rule it out on Thursday night.
“The allegations are extremely concerning and serious,” she said in an interview on MSNBC. “But I cannot, as the governor of this state, have a knee-jerk, politically motivated reaction.”
The Rev Al Sharpton, a longstanding ally of the mayor who wields considerable influence among Adams’s political base, said in an interview on Friday morning: “I think the Trump people have compromised him. And I think that he’s put the city where we are hostage.”
Asked to explain his call for Adams to resign, Antonio Delgado, the lieutenant governor, said that while the mayor was innocent until proven guilty, “it is clear that he is compromised and no longer capable of making decisions in the best interests of New York City.”
Prominent Democrats have joined growing calls for Mayor Adams to resign, including Antonio Delgado, the lieutenant governor, and Michael Gianaris, the New York Senate deputy majority leader.
On Thursday night, after Adams suggested he might direct his Charter Revision Commission to rewrite the city’s sanctuary laws, which limit cooperation with ICE, Carl Weisbrod, a member of the commission, pushed back in a text message to The New York Times. “I joined the Charter Commission to help find ways to expand housing opportunities for New Yorkers,” the message said. “I did not join to make it easier to expel law-abiding residents from the city.”
In an explosive letter on Thursday protesting the D.O.J. directive to seek dismissal of Eric Adams’s indictment, Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said her office had been preparing a superseding indictment of Mayor Adams alleging obstruction of justice. She wrote that there was “evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I.”
Sassoon also described attending a meeting with Adams’s attorneys in which they repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo: “Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” she wrote. On Thursday, the same day her letter became public, Adams agreed to allow ICE back on Rikers Island, the city’s main jail.
Adams appears alongside Trump’s border czar on Fox News to highlight his cooperation on immigration.
If Mayor Eric Adams of New York City wanted to dispel fears that he was beholden to the Trump administration in exchange for its maneuvering to have his criminal case dropped, his appearance on “Fox and Friends” on Friday morning seemed to have the opposite effect.
In the joint appearance with President Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, the two described their newfound collaboration on Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. It led to some uncomfortable moments for Mr. Adams, a Democrat.
Mayor Eric Adams of New York City announced on Thursday that he would issue an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, a significant shift in the city’s sanctuary policies.
The mayor said that he would move to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into the jail to assist in criminal investigations, “in particular those focused on violent criminals and gangs.”
Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.
Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.
Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.
The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.
The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession on Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Emil Bove III, had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the case against Mr. Adams.
The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political; Mr. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.
Ms. Sassoon, in a remarkable letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, said that Mr. Bove’s 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.”
“I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful,” she said. “I therefore deem it necessary to the faithful discharge of my duties to raise the concerns expressed in this letter with you and to request an opportunity to meet to discuss them further.”
Ms. Sassoon, 38, made a startling accusation in her letter. She wrote that the mayor’s lawyers had “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.”
A lawyer for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, said, “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us.”
“We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement, and we truthfully answered it did,” he added.
In her letter, Ms. Sassoon said that Mr. Bove had scolded a member of her team for taking notes during the meeting and ordered that the notes be collected at the meeting’s end.
Ms. Sassoon also wrote that her office had proposed a superseding indictment against the mayor that would have added a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice. The charge, she wrote, would have been “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I.” It would also have included additional accusations about his “participation in a straw donor scheme.”
Mr. Spiro, responded, saying that if prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.
“This newest false claim is just the parting shot of a misguided prosecution,” he said.
Mr. Bove accepted Ms. Sassoon’s resignation in his own eight-page letter on Thursday, in which he blasted her handling of the case and decision to disobey his order.
He told her the prosecutors who had worked on the case against Mr. Adams were being placed on administrative leave because they, too, were unwilling to obey his order.
He said they would be investigated by the attorney general and the Justice Department’s internal investigative arm. He also told Ms. Sassoon both bodies would evaluate her conduct.
But the internal investigations ordered by Mr. Bove could prove risky for him. Officials will be likely to review Mr. Bove’s conduct as well, and the judge overseeing the case could demand answers from Justice Department officials in Washington.
Matthew Podolsky, who had been Ms. Sassoon’s deputy, is now the acting U.S. attorney, a spokesman for the office said Thursday evening.
Mr. Bove’s letter offered a window into a dispute that has been raging between the Justice Department officials in Washington and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, out of sight of the public.
On Thursday afternoon, according to a pool report, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had not asked for the case against Mr. Adams to be dropped.
But Mr. Bove’s letter made explicit that he believed Mr. Trump — whom he formerly served as his criminal defense lawyer — held sway over the Justice Department, which for decades has operated at a remove from the White House.
“In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” he wrote to Ms. Sassoon, “and anyone romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and the public’s perception of our efforts.”
He wrote he had accepted Ms. Sassoon’s resignation “based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”
Until recently, Mr. Bove was one of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, representing him in his New York State criminal trial last year. The trial led to Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that had threatened to derail his 2016 campaign.
The Southern District of New York, the prosecutor’s office Ms. Sassoon led until Thursday, has long been viewed as the nation’s most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office. It has a reputation for guarding its independence and fending off interference from Washington, winning it the nickname “the Sovereign District.”
An official with the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment.
Ms. Sassoon notified her office of her decision to resign on Thursday in a brief email shortly before 2 p.m. The office has not filed a motion to dismiss the case.
“Moments ago, I submitted my resignation to the attorney general,” she wrote in the email, the text of which was provided to The New York Times. “As I told her, it has been my greatest honor to represent the United States and to pursue justice as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.”
She continued: “It has been a privilege to be your colleague, and I will be watching with pride as you continue your service to the United States.”
The Trump administration last month named Ms. Sassoon, a veteran prosecutor, to head the office on an interim basis while Mr. Trump’s choice for the job, Jay Clayton, awaited Senate confirmation. She was quickly swept into conversations with Justice Department officials about the criminal case against Mr. Adams.
The commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation, whose staff worked on the case against the mayor, said in a statement that her agency had “conducted its work apolitically, guided solely by the facts and the law.”
The commissioner, Jocelyn E. Strauber, also underscored that the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the case was unrelated to the evidence.
Mr. Adams is running for re-election, but Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has the power to remove him from office for cause. And while she had previously suggested she would not intervene, she was equivocal in an interview on MSNBC Thursday night. The allegations were concerning, she said, and she needed time to find “the right approach.”
Mr. Adams was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, stemming from an investigation that began in 2021. Mr. Adams had pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April.
Then, on Monday, Mr. Bove directed Ms. Sassoon to dismiss the case. She was also told to cease all further investigative steps against Mr. Adams until a review could be conducted by the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney, presumably Mr. Clayton, after the mayoral election in November.
Ms. Sassoon joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
In 2023, Ms. Sassoon was named co-chief of the Southern District’s criminal appeals unit, the position she held when she was promoted last month to interim U.S. attorney.
Mr. Bove in his Monday memo said that the dismissal of charges was necessary because the indictment “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown and had “improperly interfered” with Mr. Adams’s re-election campaign.
Just hours after Ms. Sassoon’s resignation on Thursday, Mr. Adams said that he would issue an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, a clear shift in the city’s sanctuary policies. The move followed a meeting earlier in the day between Mr. Adams and Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan.
The memo from Mr. Bove also criticized the timing of the charges and “more recent public actions” of Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney who brought the case, which Mr. Bove said had “threatened the integrity” of the proceedings by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity that could taint potential witnesses and jurors.
Mr. Bove appeared to be referring to an article Mr. Williams wrote last month, after leaving office, in which he said New York City was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”
The indictment against Mr. Adams was announced in September by Mr. Williams, who led the office during the Biden administration. Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has claimed that he was targeted because of his criticism of the administration over the migrant crisis — an assertion the Southern District has rebutted, noting that the investigation began well before the mayor made those comments.
Mr. Adams has praised parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration a few days later. The two men did not discuss a pardon, but Mr. Trump spoke about a “weaponized” Justice Department, The New York Times reported.
Mr. Trump had criticized Mr. Adams’s prosecution, saying the mayor had been “treated pretty unfairly,” and had floated the possibility of a pardon.
On Jan. 22, just after Ms. Sassoon was elevated to her post, the Southern District vigorously defended its prosecution in a court filing made in her name. The filing cited “concrete evidence” that Mr. Adams had taken illegal campaign contributions. It called his claim that his prosecution was politically motivated an attempt to divert attention “from the evidence of his guilt.”
Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman and Jan Ransom contributed reporting."
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