NEW YORK (AP) — An assistant U.S. attorney involved in prosecuting New York City Mayor Eric Adams became at least the seventh person to resign from the Justice Department in a standoff over the future of the corruption case, telling the department’s second-in-command Friday that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet his demand to drop the charges.
Prosecutor Hagan Scotten became the latest casualty in an epic showdown between Justice Department leadership in Washington and its office in New York, which has long prided itself on its independence.
Scotten, along with other prosecutors in the case against Adams, was suspended with pay on Thursday by acting deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove, who launched a probe of the prosecutors that he said would determine whether they kept their jobs.
Bove, who had represented Donald Trump against criminal charges before he was reelected as president in November, on Monday directed Danielle Sassoon, a Republican and the interim U.S. attorney in New York, to drop the charges against Adams.
Instead, she resigned on Thursday, along with five high-ranking Justice Department officials in Washington, a day after she sent a letter to Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi.
In response to her resignation, Bove wrote a scathing and scolding letter back.
Bove conferred with prosecutors in the department’s public integrity section Friday and instructed them to decide among themselves who should sign on to a motion to dismiss Adams’ case. The section’s acting chief was among the officials who quit Thursday.
Scotten is an Army veteran who earned two Bronze medals serving in Iraq as a Special Forces troop commander. He graduated from Harvard Law School at the top of his class in 2010 and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.
In a resignation letter to Bove, Scotten said he was “entirely in agreement” with Sassoon’s refusal to seek dismissal of charges that the mayor had accepted over $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and lavish travel perks from foreign nationals looking to buy his influence while he was Brooklyn borough president campaigning to be mayor.
Among reasons for seeking to have charges dropped, Bove said the mayor was needed in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts and to decrease violent crime. He also said the charges were brought too close to this year’s mayoral contest and could be reinstated after the election.
In his resignation letter, 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.”
The prosecutor said he was following “a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake.”
He said he could see how a president such as Trump, with a background in business and politics, “might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal.”
But Scotten said any prosecutor “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 added: “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. But it was never going to be me.”
Adams, a Democrat, pleaded not guilty to the charges in September but has recently bonded at times with Trump, who has criticized the case against Adams and said he was open to giving Adams, who was a registered Republican in the 1990s, a pardon.
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Associated Press reporter Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.
