The Justice Department on Friday filed a motion to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, leaving it to a federal judge to decide the fate of a case that has ignited a dramatic standoff between the Trump administration and veteran prosecutors.
The motion, filed in a New York court, was hand-signed by acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, and electronically signed by Edward Sullivan, a veteran public corruption prosecutor; and Toni Bacon, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Bove had instructed prosecutors in New York to move to drop the charges against Adams on Monday, saying the case could interfere with the mayor’s re-election bid and his efforts to work with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. Bove noted that his decision was not based on a consideration of the evidence or the legal theories underpinning the case.
The top prosecutor in Manhattan refused, resigning her job in protest and accusing President Donald Trump’s appointees to the Justice Department of acting for political, rather than legal, reasons. Nearly all of the supervisors within the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section also quit.
The tensions only grew on Friday, when Bove summoned the roughly two dozen remaining members of the public integrity unit and ordered them to figure out who would file the dismissal motion in federal court in New York. Also Friday, the lead prosecutor from the case in New York submitted his resignation, calling any lawyer who would ask a judge to toss the charges a “fool” or “coward.”
Bove made clear that lawyers not willing to do so could be fired and those who were could be promoted, according to multiple people in communication with lawyers at the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose what was said. His campaign to abandon the Adams case has been endorsed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Chad Mizelle, the department’s chief of staff.
The four-page filing early Friday evening largely echoed Bove’s explanations earlier this week for why the charges should be dismissed. It said Bove had concluded that the case would would impede Adams’s ability to carry out his duties as mayor “which poses unacceptable threats to public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”
The filing also repeated Bove’s claims that the trial could interfere with the New York City mayoral election later this year.
Besides Scotten, those who resigned in protest this week include Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York; Kevin Driscoll, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division; and John D. Keller, acting chief of the Public Integrity Section, which investigates public officials and election crimes.
Scotten, the former lead prosecutor on the Adams case, is a decorated Iraq War veteran and Harvard Law School graduate who, in addition to clerking for Roberts, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when Kavanaugh was an appeals court judge.
In his resignation letter, Scotten wrote that he did not view the Trump administration negatively, but considered the request to drop the charges against Adams a serious mistake. “[A]ny 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,” he wrote.
“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,” Scotten’s letter said. “But it was never going to be me.”
Sassoon, too, has sterling conservative credentials, having clerked for J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She wrote in a letter to Bondi that she could not in good faith ask a judge to drop the charges against Adams: “The law does not support a dismissal . . . I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged.”
Bove, a former personal defense lawyer for Trump who previously worked as a prosecutor in the Southern District, responded to Sassoon’s decision with a letter accusing her of insubordination, and said he was moving oversight of the Adams case to Washington to get the charges dismissed.
Trump has told reporters he was not involved in the Adams case and did not ask for the case to be dropped.
Adams was charged in September with wire fraud, bribery and seeking illegal campaign donations. Prosecutors alleged he had problematic relationships with wealthy foreigners and accepted travel upgrades, luxury hotel rooms and other perks from Turkish businesspeople and at least one government official. He pleaded not guilty.
In her resignation letter, Sassoon described a Jan. 31 meeting with Bove and Adams’s attorneys in which she said the mayor’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo,” insisting that Adams could help with the Justice Department’s immigration priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.
“Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case,” Sassoon wrote.
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for the mayor, called the accusation “a total lie.” In a statement released Friday, Adams said he was ready to put the case behind him.
“I want to be crystal clear with New Yorkers,” the statement read. “I never offered – nor did anyone offer on my behalf – any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. Never.”
Disputes over legal cases between Justice Department headquarters and U.S. Attorney’s offices across the country are not new – especially with the Southern District, known for an independent streak that has earned it the nickname “the Sovereign District of New York.”
During Trump’s first term, his administration also tangled with the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman had prosecuted members of Trump’s inner circle during his years leading the Southern District before Attorney General William P. Barr ousted him in 2020.
Berman initially resisted Barr’s efforts to force him out, and the attorney general fired him. Berman later wrote in a book that Justice Department officials during Trump’s first term had pushed him to take politically-motivated actions.
But legal experts called the tenor and tone of the conflict over the Adams case remarkable.
“What’s different about this is the grounds for dismissing the case,” said Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor and former prosecutor with the public integrity unit, pointing to the explicitly political reasons Bove cited for dropping the charges in his memo this week.
Butler said that in prior conflicts within the department, including debates over public corruption cases, “There often are tough issues on both sides. There are legitimate disagreements. And what’s different here is, it seems all about politics.”
@Spokesman Review, excluding headline