Danielle R. Sassoon, who resigned Thursday as Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, wrote to Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi to explain her refusal to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon accused the Department of Justice official who ordered the dismissal of playing politics and engaging in an unethical quid pro quo.
A 2021 article co-authored by Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, “Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?,” was referenced in Sassoon’s letter, laying out the case why the judge shouldn’t dismiss the charges either.
In particular, the rationale given by Mr. Bove—an exchange between a criminal defendant and the Department of Justice akin to the Bout exchange with Russia— is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make. Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department. See In re Christoff, 690 N.E.2d 1135 (Ind. 1997) (disciplining prosecutor for threatening to renew a dormant criminal investigation against a potential candidate for public office in order to dissuade the candidate from running); Bruce A. Page 8 Green & Rebecca Roiphe, Who Should Police Politicization of the DOJ?, 35 Notre Dame J.L. Ethics & Pub. Pol’y 671, 681 (2021) (noting that the Arizona Supreme Court disbarred the elected chief prosecutor of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his deputy, in part, for misusing their power to advance the chief prosecutor’s partisan political interests).