Saturday Night Massacre II: Electric Boogaloo

Acting US Attorney for SDNY, Danielle Sassoon, says in her resignation letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that U.S. deputy attorney General, Emil Bove, offered the disgraced NYC Mayor Eric Adams a quid pro quo to drop his corruption case in exchange for immigration enforcement… pic.twitter.com/ieXijkieYs

— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) February 13, 2025

Will Stancil:

Do people not understand what’s happening with the Eric Adams thing? The memo instructing the prosecution to be dropped explicitly said it was because he was carrying out the president’s agenda. It was “you’re working for me, so we’re letting you go.” It was an explicitly corrupt bargain

Saturday Night Massacre. On Thursday.

Valor Danielle Sassoon, Acting U.S. attorney for SDNY - refuses to drop Adams charges and resigns 

John Keller, Acting head of DOJ Public Integrity Section - refuses and resigns 

Kevin Driscoll, Acting head of DOJ Criminal Division - refuses and resigns

Trump’s people don’t want to do Trump’s work.

As is being noted, the acting heads are not random people. They were selected by the Trump administration. Even they are resigning.

There’s a letter explaining the refusal to dismiss.

The tl;dr:

In addition to being brave and the right thing to do, Sassoon’s letter points out that the Emperor has no clothes — it demolishes the utterly fatuous, transparently corrupt excuses for dismissing the Adams case.

Emil Bove wrote back.

Comments followed:

IMO Bove has gone off his rails (in part bc I think he senses he's losing the house). Now he's on the record that every DOJ employee will be subject to non-reviewable "weaponization" judgments w/no due process. 

That'll have an interesting follow-on effect.  

Did he get stupider arguing b4 Cannon?

Lots of comments:

As you're reading Bove's outrageous letter, remember that all the representations in there about how unfairly Eric Adams has been treated come from Elon Musk's personal attorney, Alex Spiro. Bove just blindly regurgitated everything that Spiro said, while accusing career prosecutors of misconduct.

Update: We now know that Bove got mad at the line prosecutors for taking notes during his meeting with Spiro, and then had separate discussions with Spiro without the line prosecutors present. Totally normal for the #2 DOJ official to do this, and totally unrelated to a quid pro quo. 

 George Conway: 

This letter is almost psychotic.

People are being suspended:

One of the AUSAs put on administrative leave by this letter is Hagan Scotten, my former Hogan Lovells colleague. I am not surprised that he would risk his job for his convictions; he has some of the strongest personal integrity of anyone I've worked with.

Saturday Night Nassacre II: Electric Boogaloo.

In the modern history of the Justice Dept., there has never been such a thug-like, ruthless perversion of the rule of law to serve political interests. Kudos to the prosecutors who stood tall, faithfully fulfilled their oath to the Constitution, and refused to buckle

The original had knock on effects I didn’t expect at the time. (Even then I was cynical. 🤨) History is repeating itself. Why shouldn’t it go all the way?

I don’t think much of Elie Honig usually, but he’s right this time:

“We thought maybe it would be a pardon for months now," Honig continued. "I will tell you in the SDNY circles that I sort of dwell in, people have been rolling their eyes at this for a long time, saying, oh, he's definitely going to get out of this somehow. He'll get a pardon. But the way this all happened makes it even worse. The fact that Emil Bove instructed SDNY to do it. And by the way, when Danielle Sassoon refused to do it — and you're right, by the way, to note that she's a conservative. Not only was she a Federalist Society member, she penned an op-ed against Joe Biden a few weeks ago, just sort of gratuitously criticizing Joe Biden's pardons." 

"But when Bove told her to do this, to dismiss the case, and when Danielle Sassoon refused, this part is really chilling to me, Emil Bove then fired back with a letter ... that said, fine, everyone around you is going to be put on administrative leave too, and now we're going to investigate you not criminally, but through our inspector general, which is the in-house ethics watchdog," said Honig. "So that is sending an unmistakable and, I think, chilling message, which is get on board with the political agenda here or be punished." 

"And it's amazing because she was prosecuting an allegedly corrupt Democrat who is kissing up to Trump," added Tapper. "It's really remarkable. You couldn't write this. If you put this in a screenplay, people would be like, that's too broad, that would never happen."