NEW YORK (AP) — The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned Thursday after being ordered by the Justice Department to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Danielle Sassoon, a Republican who was interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced her resignation in an email to her staff, and the move was confirmed by a spokesperson for the office.
Only days earlier, a senior official in Republican President Donald Trump’s Justice Department had directed New York prosecutors to scrap the case against the Democratic mayor, who was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes of free or discounted travel from people who wanted to buy his influence.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove said in a memo Monday that the case should be dismissed so Adams could aid Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for reelection free from facing criminal charges. The primary is four months away and Adams has multiple challengers.
Bove had directed that be done as soon as “practicable,” but there have been no public statements or actions by the prosecution team. On Wednesday, the new U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said she would “look into” why the case had yet to be dismissed. As of Thursday afternoon, the charges against Adams remained in place. He has pleaded not guilty.
In the email to her staff, Sassoon did not give a reason for her resignation. In the note, the contents of which were obtained by The Associated Press, she said she had just submitted her resignation to Bondi.
“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,” Sassoon wrote.
A Justice Department official told the AP that department officials did not ask Sassoon to resign. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the personnel matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The department declined public comment on Sassoon’s exit. A message seeking comment was left for Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The government’s decision to end the Adams case because of political considerations, rather than the strength or weakness of the evidence, alarmed some career prosecutors who said it was a departure from long-standing norms.
The directive from Bove, a former Trump personal lawyer, was all the more remarkable because Bove had been a longtime prosecutor and supervisor in the Southern District and because department leaders are historically reluctant to intervene in cases where charges have been brought — particularly in an office as prestigious as that U.S. attorney’s office.
Bove’s memo also steered clear of any legal basis for the dismissal despite decades of department tradition dictating that charging decisions are to be guided by facts, evidence and the law.
Sassoon, a former clerk for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was not the prosecutor who brought the case against Adams last year. That was then-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who stepped down after Trump’s election victory in November.
Sassoon had only been tapped to serve as acting U.S. attorney on Jan. 21, the day after Trump took office.
Her role was intended to be temporary. Trump in November nominated Jay Clayton, the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, to the post, an appointment that must be confirmed by the Senate. That has not happened yet.
The Southern District of New York is among the largest and most prominent prosecutor’s offices in the U.S., with a long track record of tackling Wall Street malfeasance, political corruption and international terrorism.
It has a tradition of independence from Washington, something that has earned it the nickname “the sovereign district.”
During Trump’s first term, the office prosecuted both the president’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his strategic adviser, Steve Bannon, in separate cases. Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance charges. Trump ended the federal fraud case against Bannon by pardoning him, though nearly identical charges were then brought by state prosecutors.
This is the second Justice Department tussle in five years between Washington and New York officials to result in a dramatic leadership turnover.
In 2020, William Barr, who served as one of Trump’s attorneys general during his first term pushed out Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, in a surprise nighttime announcement. Berman initially refused to resign his position, creating a brief standoff with Barr, but did so after an assurance that his investigations into allies of Trump would not be disturbed.
Sassoon joined the U.S. attorney’s office in 2016. In 2023 she helped lead the fraud prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. More recently, she had served as the office’s co-chief of criminal appeals.
Adams was indicted in September on charges that while he worked as Brooklyn borough president, he accepted over $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and lavish travel perks such as expensive flight upgrades, luxury hotel stays and even a trip to a bathhouse.
The indictment said a Turkish official who helped facilitate the trips then leaned on Adams for favors, including asking him to lobby the Fire Department to let a newly constructed, 36-story diplomatic building open in time for a planned visit by Turkey’s president.
Prosecutors said they had proof that Adams personally directed political aides to solicit foreign donations and disguise them to help the campaign qualify for a city program that provides a generous, publicly-funded match for small dollar donations. Under federal law, foreign nationals are banned from contributing to U.S. election campaigns.
As recently as Jan. 6, prosecutors had indicated their investigation remained active, writing in court papers that they continued to “uncover additional criminal conduct by Adams.”
Bove said in his memo that Justice Department officials in Washington hadn’t evaluated the evidence in the case before deciding it should be dropped — at least until after the mayoral election in November.
But he criticized “recent public actions” by Williams that he said had “threatened the integrity of the proceedings, including by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity.” Williams hasn’t spoken publicly about the Adams case since his resignation, but wrote an editorial decrying corruption in politics.
Federal agents had also been investigating other senior Adams aides. It was unclear what will happen to that side of the probe. __
Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.
