Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, three days after President Trump’s Department of Justice asked her to drop the case against Mayor Adams, a source told the Daily News.
The stunning development came amid widespread speculation as to whether she would follow through on the directive and after Trump placed her in the top job role in an acting capacity on his first full day in office.
A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney declined to comment. Sassoon could not immediately be reached.
The Monday night directive from interim Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, told Sassoon to ask Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho to dismiss the case — and said it could later be revived — at least in part to allow the mayor to focus on supporting Trump’s hardline immigration policies in the country’s largest sanctuary city.
When the motion still hadn’t been filed late Wednesday, Sassoon’s newly sworn-in boss, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, directed her office at an unrelated press conference to hurry up.
The directive from Trump’s DOJ repeated unfounded suggestions the mayor has made in recent months that he could have been unfairly targeted because he’d criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant crisis, and that former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who brought the case, created prejudicial pretrial publicity by writing an op-ed for City & State commenting generally on corruption in New York.
The memo put Sassoon in the awkward position of having to draft a motion to dismiss out of step with representations the prosecuting team made to Judge Ho disputing Adams’ claims — in one instance, calling them barefaced efforts to distract from his guilt.
The case filed last September was born out of a wide-ranging investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, and the city Department of Investigation that began several months before Adams was elected mayor.
It accuses him of abusing his government positions starting over a decade ago by accepting luxury benefits, including first-class flights and opulent hotel stays all over the world, from wealthy foreign businessmen and officials in or close to the Turkish government looking to gain influence over him.
The feds say Adams began soliciting and accepting illegal donations towards his campaign from foreign nationals when he made clear he would run for mayor around 2018, which were funneled through U.S. citizens and multiplied by eight with taxpayer dollars through the city’s public matching funds program. He denies all charges and has been set to defend them at a trial scheduled for Apr. 21.
The order from Trump’s DOJ officials, which said it was not based on a belief on whether Adams is innocent or guilty, also stood in contrast to disclosures by the public corruption prosecutors that they’d uncovered more criminality by Adams and were “quite likely” to bring additional charges.
It came as they had already secured the guilty plea of Erden Arkan, a Brooklyn real estate magnate who admitted to organizing straw donations for the mayor at his behest, and last week signaled a former top Adams aide, Mohamed Bahi, would soon cop to wire fraud charges.
Sassoon was expected to lead the office until the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, his former Securities and Exchange Commission Chief Jay Clayton. She had few means of pushing back on the order from Main Justice, absent resigning in protest.
Before taking over as acting head of the SDNY following Trump’s inauguration, the 38-year-old respected prosecutor took the lead on some of the office’s biggest cases, including in the prosecution of convicted crypto con man Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for one of the largest ever financial frauds.
A former Manhattan federal prosecutor who spoke to The News on background earlier Thursday said that although the memo didn’t mark the first time Trump’s DOJ intervened in an SDNY matter, having done so during his first term, the directive to drop the historically independent office’s highest-profile case had likely been felt like a “gut punch” to career prosecutors and left them “disheartened and disillusioned.”
“During the first Trump administration, people felt, I think, generally OK with how the office responded to pressure from the Trump administration, for example on the Michael Cohen case. But those things were fairly limited, they were around the margins, they only touched a couple of things,” the former fed said.
“For this to happen so early, before the U.S. attorney’s even appointed, I think it’s got to be kind of a gut punch and probably makes people there worry about what may come next.”