Prosecutor who quit after refusing to drop Adams case says she’s confident he ‘committed the crimes’

NEW YORK — The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned Thursday after refusing to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Before quitting, Danielle Sassoon told President Trump’s new attorney general that she was “confident” Adams had committed the crimes.

Two senior Justice Department officials also resigned after the department leadership moved to seize control of the case. The acting deputy U.S. attorney general, former Trump personal criminal defense lawyer Emil Bove, who had ordered the Adams case dropped, said in a letter accepting Sassoon’s resignation that the Justice Department in Washington would file a motion to drop the charges and bar “further targeting” of Adams.

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. The move came after a days-long standoff between the Manhattan prosecutor and her superiors in Washington.

Dueling letters from officials in New York and Washington laid bare in starkly personal language the gravity of a simmering, behind-the-scenes dispute over the handling of one of the government’s most significant current public corruption cases. The outcome not only threatens to create an irrevocable fissure in the relationship between the department’s headquarters and its most prestigious prosecutorial offices but also risks reinforcing the perception that Trump’s administration will employ a transactional approach to law enforcement decisions.

“I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached,” Sassoon wrote Wednesday in a letter to U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. Sassoon urged Bondi to reconsider the directive to drop Adams’ case.

With Sassoon refusing to comply with the Trump administration’s order, the department’s public integrity section was asked to take over the case, according to a person familiar with the matter. Two senior officials who oversee the unit, including the acting chief, resigned in response, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

The exits came days after Bove directed federal prosecutors in New York to end the case against Adams, who was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes of free or discounted travel from people who wanted to buy his influence. He has pleaded not guilty.

Bove said in a memo Monday that the case should be dismissed so Adams could aid President Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for reelection free from facing criminal charges. The primary is four months away and Adams — a Democrat who has warmed to Trump and weighed becoming a Republican — has multiple challengers.

World & Nation

Criminal case against NYC mayor hangs by a thread after Justice Department orders it dropped

The criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams hangs by a thread after the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop charges.

Feb. 11, 2025

Bove scolded Sassoon in a letter accepting her resignation. He wrote that she was “incapable of fairly and impartially reviewing the circumstances of this prosecution.” Bove said he would open internal investigations into her “conduct” and that of prosecutors who worked on the Adam case. They will be placed on “off-duty, administrative leave,” he said.

Bove had directed Sassoon to drop the case as soon as “practicable,” but there had been no public statements or actions by the prosecution team. On Wednesday, 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.

In her letter to Bondi, Sassoon accused Adams’ lawyers of repeatedly and explicitly offering what amounted to a “quid pro quo” during a meeting with the Justice Department last month. She wrote that the lawyers had offered the mayor’s assistance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities if the case were to be dismissed.

“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Sassoon wrote. She called the purported offer “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.”

In an email, Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, said the allegation of a quid pro quo was a “total lie.”

“We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us,” Spiro said. “We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement and we truthfully answered it did.”

The Justice Department’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 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. Atty. 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. Her role was intended to be temporary. Trump in November nominated Jay Clayton, the former chair 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 advisor, Stepen K. 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 more than $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.

Neumeister writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.