The Trump administration, which has been moving like a juggernaut across the political landscape, has hit a land mine.
The decision by Trump’s Justice Department to halt the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has caused uproar.
Adams had been due to stand trial in April on charges of bribery, wire fraud and soliciting illegal campaign contributions.
But the mayor has become an unlikely political bedfellow of the new president. Adams journeyed to Mar-a-Lago in Florida for lunch with Trump just before the inauguration, attended the inauguration and — just as importantly — has been echoing Trump’s language about weaponized and politically motivated prosecutions.
On Monday, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told prosecutors they were being “directed to dismiss” the charges against Adams. Bove previously served as one of the personal lawyers defending Trump during the Stormy Daniels hush money trial.
His directive over Adams was the spark that lit a much bigger fire than expected. And it came at a time when Trump has seemed to be at the apex of his power.
The first shock came when the acting lead federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, tendered her resignation.
Sassoon had only been in the job for about three weeks, but she has impeccable conservative credentials as a member of the Federalist Society and former law clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Earlier this month, Sassoon penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing former President Biden for many of the commutations he issued late in his term.
Now, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon said the Adams deal would set “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent” — one that was tantamount to “using the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure.”
Bove responded with barely concealed rage to Sassoon’s arguments, suggesting she was trying to countermand the president’s polices and was romanticizing an act of insubordination.
The case against Adams — and the Trump team’s request for its dismissal — was duly moved from Sassoon’s Southern District of New York to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) public integrity unit in Washington.
But again the lawyers balked.
The two leaders of that unit, Kevin Driscoll and John Keller, also resigned. So, too, did three other lawyers in the same division.
Still the fire did not burn out.
The lead prosecutor in the Adams case, Hagen Scotten, resigned, too. He did so in a letter in which he hammered Bove.
Scotten acknowledged that a businessman like Trump might see “a good, if distasteful, deal” in the arrangement with Adams.
But, he added, 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.
“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,” he concluded.
On Friday, the DOJ made the formal request for the courts to dismiss the charges against Adams. Now the question is where the matter goes from here.
For Trump, it’s an unexpected setback.
The new president — only the second in history to be elected to nonconsecutive terms — has won confirmation for his most controversial Cabinet nominees, taken a scythe to the federal government along with his ally Elon Musk, and issued proclamations that could have a profound effect on the wider world on issues ranging from trade to the war in Ukraine.
Yet it’s a classic New York story that has got the erstwhile resident of Trump Tower more blowback than he might have expected.
Those with long memories are reminded of the “Saturday Night Massacre” under former President Nixon.
On that occasion, Nixon leaned on the leadership of the DOJ to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned immediately. When Nixon turned to the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to do the deed, he too refused — and resigned.
Nixon did eventually find someone to fire Cox, but he was badly wounded by the episode.
Trump, though, is in a much different position. He has the fervent support of half of a deeply polarized nation, a conservative media ecosystem that consistently defends him, strong approval ratings for now — and the luster of his recent election win to lean upon.
On Friday, he seemed to give a figurative shoulder-shrug to the dramatic sequence of events.
Apparently speaking of the now-departed prosecutors, Trump said to reporters, “So when you say ‘resigned,’ they were going to be gone anyway.”
It’s also notable that, while Sassoon’s actions have received praise from Democrats like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), virtually no elected Republicans have expressed alarm.
Instead, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wondered on social media where “the sanctimonious DOJ resignations” were when Biden pardoned a number of his family members just before leaving the White House.
Cotton contended that the current controversy was “pure politics.”
Some usually Trump-friendly voices have sounded criticism, however. Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume wrote on social media that he had been “waiting for some legal justification” from the Trump team for the Adams deal.
“None has come. I’m now convinced none is coming,” Hume wrote. “Bad move.”
The saga could also, ultimately, be a bad move for Adams — at least in terms of his desire for a second term.
The charges against him are to be dismissed “without prejudice” — meaning they could be reinstated later. Sassoon appears to believe the deal was a quid pro quo for Adams backing Trump up on immigration policy.
A lawyer for Adams has rejected that interpretation.
But the mayor is, from a political standpoint, wide open to the suggestion that he is in Trump’s debt. That’s a problem in a city that then-Vice President Kamala Harris carried by almost 40 points last November.
“I want to be crystal clear with New Yorkers: I never offered — nor did anyone offer on my behalf — any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. Never,” he wrote Friday afternoon on social media.
It seems highly unlikely those words will be enough to quell the storm.
For Adams, and for Trump, the furor could yet spread in new and unpredictable ways.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
