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Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Standoff Between the Justice Department and New York Prosecutors Is an Ominous Sign of What's Coming
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. A rolling Thursday afternoon massacre has unraveled the usually staid workings of the United States Justice Department, spreading from the Southern District of New York to the Public Integrity Section in Washington D.C. On Thursday at 2 p.m., the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, quit her job rather than dismiss the department's corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. She was one of six lawyers who resigned when the acting No. 2 official at the DOJ, Emil Bove, asked them to dismiss the charges against Mayor Eric Adams, presumably because Bove, representing the interests of the Trump administration, wants to provide relief to Adams, who is freshly willing to enforce Trump's immigration dragnet in the city. In a letter to Bove, Sassoon, a former Antonin Scalia clerk, said she would not compromise her 'duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor,' and explained that she was being asked to do this 'for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case.' She added that Adams' lawyers had '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.' Bove then tried to force lawyers in the D.C. Public Integrity office to file the motion to dismiss the charges against Adams. Five more lawyers quit, plus one who did so from the hospital delivery room. On Friday, Bove tried to pressure the entire Public Integrity Section, roughly two dozen lawyers, to sign the motion to dismiss. Ultimately one attorney appears to have signed the motion to spare the rest of the department. On the Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the host and executive producer of the Talking Feds podcast. They discussed the unfolding situation, which will have seismic impacts at the DOJ, and the law. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity—you can listen to the whole thing on Amicus tomorrow morning. Dahlia Lithwick: We actually kind of know a lot of what happened because we've got both Danielle Sassoon's resignation letter and the truly frightening response from Bove. We're seeing responses from other folks at DOJ. Each of these letters is a love song to the rule of law. Harry Litman: We know an extraordinary amount, and it's all exploded into the public. We know that Emil Bove, who is playing the mustachioed villain here, actually in a meeting directed someone to delete notes that they had taken. I'm from DOJ and I spent a lot of time there, so take this with a grain of salt, but this is humongous in DOJ's history. There are two things that distinguish it to me. The first is: Because of the written record, you see the naked conflict between a good-guy and bad-guy side, between the rule of law and raw politics, because the most unforgettable sentence in all these letters so far has been when Bove said, 'Well, we are not looking at the facts and we don't question the legal theories,' and that of course is the absolute DNA of what happens in the department. The other aspect is: We're in free fall here. There are two possible precedents. People think about the Saturday Night Massacre, and then in 2021, the first couple days, the showdown in the Oval Office involving acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen. The lawyers told Trump We're all gonna resign if you do this, and Trump backed down. So here we have a cascade of scandals and of very, very senior personnel in the department—the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, a Scalia clerk with impeccable conservative credentials, and her colleague who just filed a blistering letter, a John Roberts clerk with two Bronze Stars—resigning. And then the entire leadership of the vaunted public integrity section too. So this is very high-level stuff. As of now, there's no stopping point. It's like the Roadrunner cartoon where they're just falling off the cliff waiting for the boom at the bottom. Yeah. I want to read just the last couple of lines of the resignation letter from Hagan Scotten, the John Roberts clerk, lead prosecutor on the Adams case, writing to Bove that any federal prosecutor 'would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials,' then adding: 'If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect 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.' White-hot. Right. Wow. Every word. For lawyers, this is screaming. An atom bomb across the sky for sure. I think lawyer Scotten is trying to say: Look DOJ, you want to dismiss this? Dismiss it. You can pardon Eric Adams. Pam Bondi wants to do this, fine. But making us do this thing so that it hangs over Eric Adams and forces him to comply with Donald Trump's demands? That's psycho. More than psycho, it's breathtakingly corrupt. He's saying, 'I know there's a political system out there. I am not a reflexive anti-Trumper. But guys, you have to understand the Department of Justice.' And it's clearly seismic within the federal judiciary, by the way. Everyone's read this letter. Everyone is steeped in the very culture that he is invoking. Everyone understands there's a truthful side and a mendacious side. But what he's also proffering is, if you want to do some raw political bag job, then go for it. But you cannot ask the Department of Justice that stands up and takes an oath and upholds the Constitution to do it for you. It would in effect, and this is what Sassoon said, be a lie. There is a whole established discourse here where Trump and Attorney General Bondi are trying to say the old regime 'weaponized' prosecutions, meaning that's a bad thing. And this is kind of a screaming attestation, from some very credible folks, that you are asking us to do things for crass political reasons. And man, that idea, that image of 22 public integrity lawyers locked in a room like truant children until they knuckle under, and somebody is going to file it. But then a court has to find it's in the interest of justice, and that means, I think, an investigation. This is really different from going after the Jan. 6 prosecutors, by the way. This is saying, This is purging handpicked people that you left in senior positions at the Justice Department and saying, So 'weaponized' now means precisely that you are not doing the absolute core principle of what DOJ and prosecutors do, which is going after someone based on facts and the law. So what does that leave? It leaves just politics. On TV this morning there was an unbelievable little exchange between the immigration czar for Trump, Homan, and Eric Adams, where Homan was saying, We made a deal, you'd better keep to it. Laughing about it. These lines are drawn and it's just not going away. It seems to me, if nothing else, there's going to be a hearing and the judge is going to want to hear from DOJ on the established principle, if it did this for political reasons. I read Bove's letter to Sassoon as an implicit threat to also investigate her, to investigate the other lawyers that quit. So let's just be really clear. It's not just that these people are losing their jobs, they're also now subjecting themselves to the investigative and prosecutorial power that Bove is threatening to wield. And Judge Dale Ho, who has been on this podcast, is tasked with sorting this out. Someone will file a motion to dismiss and then this goes to Judge Ho in New York. The legal charge he has is to find that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss. It has been put in the realm of raw politics or of law. So even if at the end of the day, Judge Ho could say, 'I'm not going to dismiss it'—that would be pretty extreme. But to actually look into it, that would be normal. And I think there's a little wrinkle here, because at this point you can't expect Adams to speak to why this happened. I see Ho as potentially appointing someone to make those arguments. I think that the claims from the prosecutors and from Bove will come into play. Put Bove on the stand. The department will try to resist that, but it'll be ugly. The truth being that this wasn't ordered for typical or even vaguely appropriate reasons, but was raw politics. And there's the whole other theme here where it would appear that Adams was coached by Bove to essentially offer: I'll really play ball on immigration if you'll dismiss the cases. That's a whole extra layer of corruption. I think the district court judges in this country really see in the Trump administration a great disrespect for the law and see themselves as maybe the only bulwark to at least push back, get the facts out, and that's just bad for the department and the posture that it's in. I think that what you're saying, and it's a great place to land, is that no matter what emerges from this, the quid pro quo here is that if Eric Adams goes on as the mayor, and if he in fact does exactly what he cackled about on Fox News on Friday morning, which is chortle that 'I get to be the mayor as long as I do the immigration dragnet I promised,' well, there's nothing more corrupt. You can laugh about it on Fox, but that is quid pro quo corruption, plus the promise that he will be removed if he fails to do that. So this isn't just a New York story, this isn't just an immigration story. This is a stark promise that we will keep you out of jail if you do what we in the administration want. And if that doesn't scare the face off you, this is no different from the Saturday Night Massacre. This isn't a local New York mayoral corruption story. This is a promise from the DOJ that you either play ball and do what we say or we can put you in jail. I don't know how to put it more starkly than that. I think the sort of meta point that we're discussing here is: Does this have purchase with the American people? And I'll just repeat, I am from the DOJ and I want to say that within the DOJ this is a body blow. It's going to hurt them all to go before judges. This is exactly what they're schooled in not doing; the reason they came to the department. But even leaving that aside, I think the themes of corruption and bullying, the really nasty, overbearing, insulting, threatening aspect to it, to me brings home to people generally, even if they're not schooled in the DOJ way, that is now coming through in the letters. I love that image. Harry. This is , right? Emil Bove as the mean principal, locking everybody in the room until someone folds.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'A Mortal, Existential Threat': Harry Litman on the DOJ Crisis
Harry Litman is one of America's foremost legal commentators with his frequent cable news appearances, his Talking Feds podcast, and his popular Substack newsletter. Now he can add senior legal columnist for The New Republic to that long list of accomplishments, as Harry has joined up with us after leaving the Los Angeles Times last this Inside Story, Litman talks about why he chose TNR as his new home and then moves to the grim developments unfolding at Trump's Justice Department. 'I can tell you for a fact people are both irate and terrified,' he said. Watch and learn what he thinks will happen at the DOJ, the Supreme Court, and our other key legal institutions in the second age of Trump.
