Former Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon was given just 40 minutes to brief Department of Justice officials on the logistics of Mayor Adams’ federal corruption case and had no time to go over other issues connected to the DOJ’s reasons for dropping the case, she wrote in a newly unsealed letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi last month.
Sassoon, who resigned rather than follow the order to drop the case over concerns the deal between Adams and the Trump administration was improper, wrote Bondi in the hopes of having further conversations about the case. She said that her prosecutors had less than an hour to talk about the “chronology of the investigation” at a January meeting between her team, DOJ officials and Adams’ legal team in Washington, D.C. The probe had been underway for several years.
“I remain baffled by the urgent and superficial process by which this decision was reached,” Sassoon wrote.
At the end of the meeting, then-acting U.S. deputy attorney general Emil Bove directed a member of her team to shred their notes, she said.
The letter, along with other materials Adams’ lawyers and Trump Justice Department officials say prove Adams was unjustly prosecuted, was unsealed on Tuesday after the judge in the case ordered it.
Sassoon had previously revealed that at the Jan. 31 meetings, the mayor’s attorneys “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. The deal has come under widespread criticism over its provisions that Adams help the Trump White House caryr out its hardline immigration efforts.
The case against Adams, filed in September 2024, accuses Adams of abusing his government positions starting over a decade ago by accepting luxury benefits, including first-class flights and opulent hotel stays worldwide from wealthy foreign businessmen and officials in or close to the authoritarian-leaning Turkish government looking to gain influence over him. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The prosecutor admitted that Damian Williams, her predecessor in the role, took “self-serving actions” like creating a personal website — but she said that dismissing the case because of those actions was extreme.
Trump DOJ officials have claimed that Adams’ case should be dropped in part because he was politically targeted, claiming that Williams rushed into indicting Adams to further his own political career.
“There are myriad ways to address any arising prejudice or perception of weaponization well short of a dismissal-steps routinely taken in other cases with pretrial publicity—but I have never had a chance to raise them,” Sassoon wrote.
DOJ lawyers had previously cited portions of texts between Southern District prosecutors in the case, claiming that those communications were proof the indictment was politically motivated.
The documents drop includes texts between prosecutors in the case debating on how to word the indictment.
“All good here other than my kids gave me a stomach bug for the weekend,” Hagan Scotten, a prosecutor in the case who also resigned over the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, wrote to an SDNY investigator in a friendly November text exchange where the investigator asks if he was considering becoming a judge.
“Got to convict Adams before I think about anything else. Hope all is well between you and yours,” Scotten continued.
Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho ordered the full exchanges be released last week.
“As I’ve said from the beginning, this bogus case that needed ‘gymnastics’ to find a crime – was based on ‘political motive’ and ‘ambition’ not facts or law,” Spiro said in a statement. “The more we learn about what was really going on behind the scenes, the clearer it is that Mayor Adams should have never been prosecuted in the first place.”
This is a developing story; it will be updated.
With Chris Sommerfeldt