Eric Adams case: DOJ seeks dismissal

The Department of Justice on Friday filed a motion to dismiss the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after seven federal prosecutors quit in protest over the DOJ’s demand to toss the case.

The DOJ asked Manhattan federal court Judge Dale Ho to dismiss the case without prejudice. The filing noted that Adams agreed to the request.

If Ho grants the motion and dismisses the five-count indictment against Adams, the DOJ would have the right to refile the criminal charges against the mayor in the future.

That right has raised concerns that President Donald Trump will have significant leverage over Adams to get the Democratic mayor to cooperate with the Republican president’s policies on immigration and other issues.

Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday after refusing to follow an order by Bove to file the dismissal motion, cited that concern in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department,” Sassoon had written.

Shortly after Sassoon resigned, Adams agreed Thursday to allow federal immigration agents into the city’s massive jail complex on Riker’s Island.

Friday’s dismissal motion says that acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove concluded that continuing prosecuting Adams would “interfere with the defendant’s ability to govern in New York City, which poses unacceptable threats to public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

The court filing also said Bove concluded the dismissal was necessary “because of the appearances of impropriety and risks of interference” with New York’s primary and mayoral elections this year.

“The Acting Deputy Attorney General reached that conclusion based on, among other things, review of a website maintained by a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York [Damian Williams] and an op-ed published by that former U.S. Attorney,” the filing said.

The dismissal request was signed by Bove, and by Antoinette Bacon, a supervisory official of the DOJ’s criminal division in Washington, D.C., and Edward Sullivan, a senior prosecutor in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Earlier Friday, Bove promised promotions to leadership positions for remaining prosecutors in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who would agree to sign a motion to dismiss Adams’ case.

Bove gave the prosecutors a deadline of one hour to provide him with the names of two attorneys who would sign the motion, according to NBC News.

DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle in a statement said, “The decision to dismiss the indictment of Eric Adams is yet another indication that this DOJ will return to its core function of prosecuting dangerous criminals, not pursuing politically motivated witch hunts.”

“The fact that those who indicted and prosecuted the case refused to follow a direct command is further proof of the disordered and ulterior motives of the prosecutors,” Mizelle said. “Such individuals have no place at DOJ.”

Bove’s video call with the section’s team came as a seventh prosecutor resigned over his controversial order to dismiss the case.

Four prosecutors who resigned Thursday included the acting Public Integrity Section chief John Keller and three other members of his team.

The latest prosecutor to quit, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to Bove, said, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.

“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

On Thursday, Scotten’s boss Sassoon, resigned in protest.

Within hours of Sassoon quitting, Keller, the three other Public Integrity Section prosecutors, and the DOJ’s acting criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll, all resigned rather than execute Bove’s order.

Bove, while in private legal practice, previously represented Trump in his criminal hush money trial in New York last year. Trump was convicted of nearly three dozen felony counts of falsifying business records in that case, but received a sentence of no jail time or probation.

Scotten in his letter scoffed at Bove’s stated rationales for dismissing the Adams case.

Bove claimed the case interfered with Adams’ ability to “fully cooperate with the federal government” on the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policies in New York, and Bove also cited comments about Adams made by Williams, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

“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,” Scotten wrote.

“The second justification is worse,” Scotten wrote. “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,” Scotten wrote.

“Some will view the mistake you are committing here in light of their generally negative views of the new Administration,” he wrote. “I do not share those views.”

The prosecutor, referring to Trump, wrote, “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 prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” Scotten wrote.

Scotten is a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower court.

Bove on Thursday had placed Scotten on administrative leave along with another prosecutor on the Adams case, Derek Wikstrom.

Bove in a letter to Sassoon said he was taking that step after she indicated that Scotten and Wikstrom agreed with her decision to refuse to drop the case, and were “unwilling to comply with the order to dismiss this case.”

Bove said the prosecutors would be investigated by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility for their conduct, along with Sassoon. Bondi then would determine if Scotten and the prosecutors should be fired, Bove wrote.