Another federal prosecutor assigned to the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams resigned on Friday, following the acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s directive to interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to drop the case, who resigned with a letter to Bove and refused to file the motion to dismiss. Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten announced his departure from the Southern District of New York with his own scathing letter to Bove, saying that it would take a “fool” to file the motion to dismiss the charges.
Scotten, an Army vet who served in Iraq, had been placed on administrative leave yesterday after refusing to carry out the motion outlined in Bove’s original memo. In that communiqué, Bove, who had previously represented Trump in his criminal trial, said that “recent public actions by the former U.S. Attorney responsible for initiating the case have threatened the integrity of the proceedings,” referring to Damian Williams, who spoke of the case on a personal website and penned an op-ed in January, both of which were done after he had resigned from his position at SDNY. In his resignation letter, Scotten said he saw little of value in Bove’s argument, calling it “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”
Scotten found the second argument in Bove’s memo “worse.” Bove had argued that the Adams’ prosecution interfered with the mayor’s “ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts ‘to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement,’ as described in Executive Order 14165.” The memo also stresses that the dismissal would be “with prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be brought back at a later date, giving the impression that Adams would be left alone on the condition that he would implement the president’s policies. “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,” Scotten argued to Bove in his resignation Friday. “But any 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.”
“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,” the assistant U.S. attorney concluded. Scotten is the seventh federal prosecutor to resign since the acting Deputy A.G.’s order to drop the charges against Adams earlier this week. John Keller, acting head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity section, resigned when the case was reassigned to his office, as did Kevin Driscoll, acting head of the Criminal Division.
