Three more federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York have resigned over the now-dropped corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Assistant US Attorneys Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom from the Southern District of New York (SDNY) had all refused to file the motion to dismiss the charges against Adams in February as instructed by Department of Justice leadership in Washington D.C., and had been placed on administrative leave a month ago as an investigation into their handling of the case was carried out.
In a letter released on Tuesday announcing their resignation, Cohen, Rohrbach, and Wikstrom accused Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche of seeking a mea culpa from the attorneys before letting them return to work. “It is now clear that one of the preconditions you have placed on our returning to the Office is that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the Office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case,” the letter reads. “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none.”
These three resignations follow others that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the charges against Adams being dropped. The original prosecutor on the case, Danielle Sassoon, a conservative lawyer who had previously clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, called the abrupt dismissal of the case a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” and resigned on February 13th. Her resignation was swiftly followed by six other US Attorneys across SDNY and in Washington D.C. the following day.
“We have served under Presidents of both parties, advancing their priorities while pursuing justice without fear or favor,” the attorneys state in Tuesday’s letter. “The role of a career prosecutor is not to set policy. But a prosecutor must abide by the oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States and the rules of professional ethics set by the bar and the courts.” They further claim that “the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong.”
Eric Adams had consistently claimed that his prosecution by federal prosecutors under Biden was politically motivated. In evaluating and ultimately granting the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, Judge Dale E. Ho wrote in his ruling that there was “no evidence–zero” that there had been any impropriety on the part of prosecutors in bringing the case.
