Friday, February 14, 2025

Fire At Will

 Which one’s Will?

DOJ leadership has put all Public Integrity Section lawyers into a room with 1 hour to decide who will dismiss Adams indictment or else all will be fired. Sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president’s political agenda. 🇺🇸
The former lead prosecutor calls the decision to dismiss “clearly pretextual.” And furthermore:
"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," he argued. 
He closed his letter [of resignation] by delivering a scathing assessment of the ethics of the lawyers currently serving in the Trump administration. 
"Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way," Scotten wrote. "If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expected you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward to file your motion. But it was never going to be me."
And they still aren’t hiding it (there’s a reason Nixon did it on Saturday night):
DOJ lawyers should go on a mass nationwide strike.
Maybe that would get somebody’s attention. 🤦‍♂️ (That’s for me. Slapping my forehead because this was so obvious…)

Well, now I understand why they won’t just give Adams a pardon. They need him on a leash. 

Again: duh. 😒 

The hits just keep on coming:
If Pam Bondi wants to dismiss the Eric Adams indictment, she can just do it herself. She is the attorney general, she doesn’t need to have a line prosecutor do it for her. But they want to be able to say a career person did it.

Professor Vladeck shines light in dark corners;

On Monday, the Acting Deputy Attorney General,1 Emil Bove, directed the New York federal prosecutors to drop the charges, offering a series of reasons that … fail to persuade. But what was most striking about the first Bove memo was footnote 1: 
Your Office correctly noted in a February 3, 2025 memorandum, "as Mr. Bove clearly stated to defense counsel during our meeting [on January 31, 2025], the Government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams's assistance on immigration enforcement."
There’s an old Twitter meme about how “My ‘Not involved in human trafficking’ shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.” (Or, if you prefer, “The lady doth protest too much.”) That was my reaction to this footnote—the need to put in writing that dropping the prosecution was not in exchange for “assistance on immigration enforcement” sure seemed to strongly imply that actually … it was. 
Fast forward to a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Bondi by Danielle Sassoon, the Interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (i.e., the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan).2 Sassoon’s letter is … stunning. (And the New York Times has helpfully annotated it to provide additional background.) Not only did she vigorously defend the decision to indict Adams (and the strength of the indictment); she also wrote that, during the meeting that Bove’s memo mentioned in footnote 1, Adams’s lawyers had indeed “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 letter goes on to methodically pick apart all of the arguments the Bove memo made for dropping the case against Adams, and requests that Bondi reconsider Bove’s memo in light of its analysis. As Sassoon concluded, “I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department's priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record.” If Bondi wouldn’t reconsider, Sassoon offered her resignation as Interim U.S. Attorney. 
That would all have been scandalous enough, but then there’s the eight-page letter Bove sent to Sassoon today—purporting to accept her resignation (that’s actually the Attorney General’s job, but we’ll skip the formalities), and accusing her of “insubordination.” As Bove writes, 
This decision is based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General. 
Bove then noted that he’s placing two of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys who assisted in the Adams case on administrative leave, and is transferring the Adams case to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section—which, he explained, will seek dismissal of the prosecution under Fed. R. Crim. P. 48. Shortly thereafter, the top lawyer in that section (and the acting head of the criminal division) resigned—followed a few hours later by three other attorneys. In other words, six senior Justice Department lawyers resigned rather than carry out Bove’s directive to drop the Adams case. In case you’re scoring at home, that’s twice as many lawyers as were fired/resigned in the original “Saturday Night Massacre.” 
What’s striking about this is not just how transparent what’s actually happening is; it’s Bove’s candid admission, in today’s letter, that “the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General” take precedence over a Justice Department lawyer’s oath … to the Constitution. It would be one thing if Bove argued that the President’s (or Attorney General’s) interpretation of the Constitution takes precedence over that of an Interim U.S. Attorney. But that’s not even his argument. Rather, it’s that Sassoon (who, although it shouldn’t matter, is a Republican who clerked for Justice Scalia) had no business raising to the Attorney General her view of what the law required in a case in which it conflicts with the political preferences of the President—indeed, that it was “insubordinate” for her to do so. 
So we have what sure as sh*t seems like a quid pro quo on DOJ’s part (dropping the Adams case in exchange for Adams using his powers as mayor to assist federal immigration enforcement efforts); a principled, Republican DOJ attorney raising concerns about the whole situation and asking for a meeting with the Attorney General; and the Acting Deputy Attorney General describing those efforts as “insubordination” while accepting her resignation—without any word from the Attorney General herself. 
There’s still, of course, the matter of actually dismissing the prosecution. The district judge (Judge Dale Ho) may have very little discretion to deny a Rule 48 motion to dismiss. But I suspect he’s going to have some choice questions for whoever shows up from DOJ (and, perhaps, Bove himself if he’s summoned) before signing off. In the meantime, this all redounds to the detriment of the Justice Department’s public reputation—not just for the deal it appears to have made, but for the way it has treated and is treating the lawyers who had enough principles to object. And all of this to twist the arm of one allegedly corrupt mayor into cooperating with immigration enforcement. 
Yikes.

Emphasis added. 

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