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Mayor Eric Adams is one lucky son of a gun. The New York City politico bent the knee to President Donald Trump on immigration enforcement, and that has gotten him off the hook on corruption charges for now. Unfortunately, Trump’s actions have left many rightly shaking their heads.
Interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Danielle Sassoon has resigned because she could not in good conscience accept the order to dismiss the corruption charges against Adams. The SDNY debunked the claim that the Adams case was a political hit job by former President Joe Biden.
“Justice Department’s directive, issued by Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, with the approval of the just-confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi, was explicitly political,” writes former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who worked for the SDNY for many years. “Indeed, Bove conceded that he had not evaluated the evidence in the case and did not question the integrity of Sassoon and the SDNY prosecutors assigned to the case — who only a few days earlier had made a submission to the court dismantling Mayor Adams’s claims that he’d been the victim of politicized prosecution by his fellow Democrats in the Biden DOJ.”
Sassoon clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and led the SDNY prosecution against crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. As the interim U.S. attorney, she was in a position to know the details of the 57-page indictment against Mayor Adams.
Acting Deputy AG Bove responded to Sassoon’s resignation by denouncing it as politically motivated and placing all her fellow prosecutors who worked on the case on administrative leave and subject to investigation.
DOJ officials Kevin Driscoll and John Keller also resigned, along with other assistant attorneys. The most notable departure was Hagan Scotten — a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and a Special Forces veteran — who said in his resignation to Bove, “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.”
This whole situation is pretty distasteful, to say the least. Is Adams really an important enough piece of the political puzzle to warrant such a favor? This seems like a petty waste of political capital to give the Democrats a taste of their own medicine.
There are scant few positive points to come out of this kerfuffle. One of them is that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can now go into New York City and clean out the criminal illegals that are terrorizing the streets and the subways. This helps Adams look like he’s actually being tough on crime, which is what New Yorkers elected him to be.
Trump might also be looking ahead to the midterms. Adams is a prominent black politician who is the living embodiment of the Democrat soap box that blacks are always oppressed by the justice system. Trump can point to Adams’s case and say to voters that he was looking out for black men and righting the injustice of misplaced prosecution — though in Adams’s case, it wasn’t really misplaced. The corruption charges against him were not spurious. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that Adams was using foreign entities for quid pro quos.
Does punting the case against him really help Adams from a reelection standpoint? According to Emerson College polling, not really. If disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, were to throw his hat in the ring for the mayoral position, that would drastically shift votes away from Adams. Cuomo hasn’t announced yet, but he’s expected to in the next month.
Does this new quid pro quo really help Trump? Maybe he thought that because Adams is a Democrat, it wouldn’t be so obvious. As of now, this seems like a checkers move, a tit for tat, a rub-the-Democrats’-nose-in-it kind of move. It wastes time and political capital, and for little in return.
