In a co-authored op-ed for U.S. News & World Report, Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, explains why President Donald Trump’s Justice Department’s order to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams for political reasons “threatens the rule of law.”
In an escalating showdown over the Trump adminsitration’s moves to suspend the corruption and fraud case against New York City’s mayor, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and five attorneys in the Justice Department’s public integrity section in Washington, D.C. resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the case.
The standoff over an administration seeking to use the Justice Department for political ends is an even more alarming transgression than President Richard Nixon’s interference with the Justice Department during the Watergate scandal more than 50 years.
“The best hope is that lower-level lawyers will follow the lead of principled prosecutors like Sassoon by doing their jobs in the tradition that Robert Jackson articulated so well. That means declining to follow directions that are improper and resigning in protest if necessary,” wrote Bruce Green, professor at Fordham Law School and director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, who co-authored the article for U.S. News & World Report.
This article was picked up by MSN.