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San Francisco Chronicle
23-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
Veteran educator Carlos Osvaldo Cortez is expected to be named next week as the 11th chancellor in 13 years to lead the financially troubled City College of San Francisco, edging out the interim chancellor, the Chronicle has learned. The seven trustees are in contract negotiations with Cortez, and a majority favor him over Interim Chancellor Mitch Bailey, said knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Bailey has fallen out of favor with the faculty union, which strongly influences the majority on the seven-member board of trustees. The chancellor selection echoes a constant debate at City College over the best approach to restoring the college to good fiscal health and increasing enrollment. The faculty union and its supporters on the board want to dip into reserves to boost spending, saying this approach is the best way to attract more students. By contrast, Bailey says he wants to 'adjust college operations to align with current resources,' a practice that matches expectations of accreditors and state officials. The college has been under an accreditation warning sanction over its governance and finances since early 2024. Chancellor selections are secretive, with deliberations happening behind closed doors. At City College, they are a near-annual ritual. If approved, possibly at the May 29 board meeting, Cortez would become the school's fifth permanent head since 2012. There have been six interim chancellors during that time. The selection of Cortez over Bailey would be the second time in a year that the trustees have replaced a chancellor who sought greater financial stability by aligning spending with revenue. Cortez is seen as faculty-friendly. In the San Diego Community College District, where Cortez was chancellor from summer 2021 through spring 2023, faculty pay increased modestly, by an average of 2.5% in 2022 and 4.5% a year later, after a period of small increases before he arrived. Cortez quit that job after a year and a half. He was paid a total of $1.36 million during his short tenure, including $546,601 for his final four months, according to Transparent California, a database of California public employee salaries. While chancellor in San Diego, Cortez made news in 2022 when he was forced to cancel his belated welcoming ceremony at Petco Park after receiving complaints for inviting Alice Walker as keynote speaker. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of 'The Color Purple' has for years been accused of antisemitism, including for penning a poem in which she called the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, 'poison,' and for her support of conspiracy-theorist David Icke. After 20 months on the job, Cortez announced in March 2023 that he was taking 'extended emergency leave' to care for his ill parents. On May 1, district officials announced that he had resigned to be with his parents in Florida. By that fall, however, he was a finalist for the chancellor's job in three Bay Area college districts: Peralta in the East Bay, Contra Costa and San Mateo. Court records show that on Jan. 19, 2024, police in Florida arrested Cortez on suspicion of driving under the influence. Ultimately, he pled no contest to the reduced charge of reckless driving. In a phone conversation, Cortez declined to answer a reporter's questions without authorization from City College. But he said the Florida charge was due to a 'mixture of prescription medicine.' While Bailey has not suggested layoffs, he has adopted an approach that acknowledges financial instability at the college of 44,000 full- and part-time students. Salaries eat up 90% of the general fund, compared with 82% statewide, and next year the college will lose millions of dollars in extra state funding that has kept it afloat since 2018 due to severe enrollment loss. Reserves are at 16% of general fund expenditures, far below the 33% average across other colleges. Among the ideas Bailey references in a May 8 budget update are reducing the number of single classes that attract few students and currently make up 70% of academic offerings. Instead, Bailey wants faculty to consider teaching more groups of classes that carry large numbers of students toward their degrees. It's an idea that does not sit well with the union, the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2121. 'In a dizzyingly shallow presentation, Interim Chancellor proposes cuts to 70% of College with no analysis,' the union headlined its essay accusing Bailey of targeting ethnic studies classes. The union essay called for 'serious leadership' that would tap into its $31 million reserves to pay for more academics, not less. Alexis Litzky, a communications professor and outgoing chair of the Academic Senate, called the union's description of Bailey's idea for boosting more popular classes a 'mischaracterization of the chancellor's presentation.' She said Bailey is not suggesting that the college axe classes but that faculty review course offerings so that City College can 'evaluate options for updating our programs and schedules.' The Academic Senate works with both the union and administrators. Litzky said the college has been confronting its accreditation missteps by working with a state assistance team, and that Bailey's budget workshops have been helpful in educating the college community about its finances. 'It actually feels like we're going in the right direction,' she said. Cortez, 50, earned his doctorate at the University of Southern California, focusing on 'African American Womanist political historical contributions to social welfare and education policy reform,' according to his employment bio. During his academic career as an instructor and administrator, Cortez served as dean of instruction at Berkeley City College and, before becoming chancellor in San Diego, was president of San Diego College of Continuing Education. The Chronicle reached out to trustees in each of the Bay Area college districts where Cortez applied since leaving San Diego, as well as to trustees of Madison College and Pasadena City College, where he was a finalist in April 2024 before he withdrew his name from consideration. Cortez told the Chronicle he had decided he didn't want to live in Madison. Only one trustee responded, agreeing to comment without being identified because the person was not authorized to speak about it publicly. 'He is very charismatic. He dazzled us,' said the board member from Pasadena. But the college did not select Cortez as its leader. The trustee declined to say why. San Diego trustees did not respond to requests for comment. Professor Inna Kanevsky, who teaches psychology at San Diego Mesa College and got into a public dispute with Cortez over the Alice Walker episode, said she was 'sad to hear' that he was the leading candidate at City College. Cortez drew ire from the free-speech group FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — when he blocked Kanevsky on social media after she complained that the Walker invitation would harm Jewish students. FIRE told the college district that the action violated Kanvesky's First Amendment rights. The chancellor then deleted his own account.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
I Teach Jewish Studies. There's a Bitter Irony to What the Trump Administration Is Asking of My Campus.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education sent a letter to 60 institutions of higher education across the United States, warning them of potential enforcement actions if they do not address what the department calls 'the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.' The small liberal arts college in New York where I teach Jewish Studies was among these 60 schools. As the sole permanent tenure-track faculty member in Jewish Studies at my school, I would really rather be spending my time helping students pore through complicated legal arguments in old tracts of the Talmud, or evaluating the differences between rationalist and anti-rationalist trends in medieval Jewish thought, or thinking about the knotted course of Jewish emancipation in modern Europe. But in the past year, as our campus has become embroiled in contentious protests about Israel's war in Gaza and debates over our college's responsibility to respond to it, my academic discipline of Jewish Studies has become unavoidably politicized. Since last fall, when our school had its Gaza solidarity encampment, Jewish students have come to my office to speak about their feelings about the campus climate. My Jewish students, contrary to what the Trump administration would have us believe, hold a broad spectrum of opinions about Israel and Palestine, the current war, and the environment on campus. I have a Jewish student who received disciplinary action from the school for leading the protests, and a Jewish student who felt sufficiently threatened by some of the rhetoric coming from the protesters that they did not want to leave their room for several days. And I have many Jewish students in the mushy middle between those two poles, sympathetic to some criticism of Israel's war while also feeling that some of the anti-Israel rhetoric has gone too far. But what all my students, Jewish and non-Jewish, share, no matter their feelings about Gaza and campus protests, is disdain for the exploitation of real concerns about antisemitism on campus to fuel a broader crackdown on liberal education in the United States. And that is what they see coming from the Trump administration right now. When they look at the actions of the Trump administration, my students observe a broad assault on the very concept of a liberal, humanist higher education, an ideal which all of us at this institution share. They see an administration cutting funding for necessary academic research to make examples of universities, even when that will hurt Jewish see an administration detaining a Columbia alumnus with a valid green card for, while he was a graduate student, protesting the actions of the state of Israel, even while the administration admits he was not breaking the law. And they see an administration which entered office with detailed plans to dismantle higher education in this country root and branch, and is now seizing its opportunity to do just that. My students see all that, and no matter their disagreements over Gaza and campus protests, they are unified in doubting the Trump administration's commitment to genuinely fighting campus antisemitism. When the Trump administration is telling German politicians to abandon their post-Holocaust commitment to keeping far-right extremists out of government, and appointing officials with long histories of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories to high office, my students across the political spectrum doubt that Donald Trump and his administration are serious about fighting antisemitism. Rather, they see a government using the pretext of fighting antisemitism to destroy the foundations of the liberal arts education that all my students, despite wide political differences, cherish and value. And that, in turn, makes them less likely to want to speak up at all, even when they do have legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus. Contrary to what the Trump administration seems to think, I have seen my students in class have productive, sensitive discussions about the complicated histories of the Israeli and Palestinian national movements, and how these histories redound today. I have seen them disagree respectfully, engaging with and learning from each other. But they are less likely to do that if they fear an errant word could be taken up by national politicians and turned against the college as a whole. Much of my time is spent thinking and teaching about the transformations in Jewish identity that occurred as Europe as Jews gradually left the ghettos and acquired equal rights of citizenship. Though the specific histories differ according to time and place, what my students observe is that there is a reason Jews have tended to support liberal political movements advocating religious freedom, pluralism, and equality under the law. As a long-persecuted minority, Jews tend to do better in such political environments. Trump, in contrast, is pointing us away from the liberal, pluralist values that have secured Jewish thriving in the United States, and toward an earlier model by which Jews related to sovereign governments: the court Jew, those Jews of Europe who made themselves indispensable to non-Jewish rulers by providing financial services and other support to the crown. In return, these Jews received temporary protection and an improvement in their social status—but these protections were always temporary, always something that could be taken away if times got tough and the ruler needed a scapegoat. Becoming a temporary protected class of the sovereign is always a dangerous position for a minority to be put in. Earlier this year, our college received another directive from the Department of Education informing us that in the name of fighting 'Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion' initiatives—a right-wing bogeyman that is as universal and as spectral an enemy for Trump now as Communism was for the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—we are no longer permitted to educate students about implicit biases during freshmen orientation, as we have long done. This directive, however, came with a large asterisk: We are still permitted to educate students about antisemitism. Antisemitism education, in other words, receives a special carve-out from broader anti-DEI policies. Jews get to be the special minority group receiving temporary protection from the government. Not only does this separate Jews from other groups with which we might stand in solidarity, but it makes it impossible to educate students about the actual forms that antisemitism today takes. Imagine, for example, trying to teach about the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the deadliest anti-Jewish violence in American history, but being banned from teaching about the shooter's well-documented hatred of immigrants, which he linked to his hatred of Jews, whom he blamed for bringing immigrants into the United States. The mere thought of teaching about antisemitism this way is absurd, and yet this is precisely what the Trump administration's policy of allowing us to teach our students about antisemitism but banning education about xenophobia and anti-immigrant hatred would accomplish. By making Jews his personal pet minority—his court Jews, so to speak—Trump is making it impossible for us to link antisemitism to other forms of bigotry, and thereby to understand it in its real historical context. My students learn about this history, and they see parallels between the long history of governments temporarily protecting Jews and how the Trump administration is now instrumentalizing Jews and Jewish safety, turning us into scapegoats for a larger crackdown on higher education across the country. Right now, Trump may say that he is acting on behalf of Jews. But a government that can detain student activists extrajudicially if it does not like their speech is a government that has abandoned its commitment to the liberal values that have made the United States possibly the greatest place for Jews in diaspora over many centuries. By claiming to be acting on behalf of Jews while engaging in a preconceived right-wing ideological fight against the American university, the Trump administration gets a double win. They can claim to be acting on behalf of a powerful minority group, feeding into antisemitic narratives of shadowy Jewish power behind the scenes, while disguising the true nature of the Christian nationalist influences standing behind this campaign against higher education. Then if people start to actually miss the valuable research being done at these institutions of higher learning, American Jews will be made to take the fall for an assault on higher education that the American right has wanted to undertake since long before Oct. 7, 2023. There is real antisemitism on college campuses and in American society more broadly, and it deserves to be addressed. But that would mean investing more in education, to learn critical lessons from history. And it would mean having difficult but necessary discussions about Israel and Palestine and their relationship to Jews and Palestinians living in the United States, discussions involving the kind of questions I know my students are fully capable of posing. But my students tell me they are now less likely to speak out, knowing how easily their concerns can be exploited by a hostile administration. So when the Trump administration sends a letter to our college, turning us into a symbol of the liberal arts education model he is trying to decimate, I want to send them a letter right back, saying: 'Stay away from our campus. Our students deserve better than to be your pawns.'
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Column: We live in Mike Davis' L.A. — but not the one you think
Hellish wildfires. Whiplash weather. Destructive winds. Debris flows. Torrential rains accenting punishing droughts. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis predicted. The late urbanist first made waves in the 1990s for forecasting an L.A. that would be one ecological and manmade disaster after another. His work quickly made him controversial among civic boosters, who dismissed him as a negative nabob who didn't want the city to thrive. Today, Davis is one face on the Mt. Rushmore of L.A.'s prophets, alongside Joan Didion, Carey McWilliams and Octavia Butler. His words, more than anyone else's, have been cited by writers and pundits across the world in this annus horribilis where nothing seems to be going right and everything seems to be getting worse. Read more: Mike Davis, 'City of Quartz' author who chronicled the forces that shaped L.A., dies With respect to his fellow titans, none of them ever assailed the poultry industry for bragging about reaping "profit from the influenza-driven restructuring of global chicken production.' That's exactly what Davis wrote in a 2006 book warning about the threat of avian flu, complete with a photo of a menacing white rooster on the cover. Davis is the man of the moment, the person whose work all Angelenos should parse like a secular Talmud — but his premonitions of hellfire and brimstone aren't what we should heed most. The rest of the nation has eagerly waited for Los Angeles to collapse into tribal warfare and anarchy the moment a mega-catastrophe happened. If ever there was a time for that, it would be now, after the Palisades and Eaton fires. While local political leaders have mostly fumbled or squandered the moment, it's regular folks who have risen to the occasion. They have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for recovery efforts via everything from benefit concerts to donation jars at restaurants. Volunteers continue to clean up burn areas and gather supplies, with the promise to fire victims that they will not be abandoned. Welcome to the Los Angeles Mike Davis wanted. As someone who has read most of Davis' work and knew him personally, I can say that his writings were cris de coeur more than lamentations. He was less Jeremiah and more John the Baptist, preparing the way for who would ultimately save L.A.: Us. 'Although I'm famous as a pessimist, I really haven't been pessimistic,' Davis told me in 2022, the last time we saw each other, months before he died of esophageal cancer at 76. 'You know, [my writing has] more been a call to action." To cast him as an apocalyptic wet blanket is a disservice to a writer remembered by friends and family as all heart — a man who had faith that while L.A. would eventually go up in flames, it would emerge from the ashes stronger than ever. 'Mike hated being called a 'prophet of doom,'' said Jon Wiener, a retired UC Irvine history professor who hosts the Nation's weekly podcast and was a co-author of Davis' last book, 'Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.' 'When he wrote about environmental disasters, he wasn't offering prophecy — he was reporting on the latest in climate science, and considering the human cost of ignoring it.' Even while he was writing "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear," Davis was picking away at 'Set the Night on Fire,' which he invited Wiener to shepherd toward publication. 'He wanted to show that the young people of color of Los Angeles had played a heroic part in fighting for a more equal future for their city' as a way to teach a new generation of activists to not lose hope in even the most dire of times, Wiener said. I asked Wiener what his longtime friend would say about post-fire L.A. 'While hundreds of millions [are] being raised to rebuild big houses in the Palisades and Altadena,' Wiener responded, Davis would remind folks not to forget 'the people who had worked there as gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and day laborers ... [who] are having trouble paying the rent and feeding their kids.' Read more: Advocates gather to demand equitable fire recovery for longtime Altadena residents, immigrants and others Thankfully, Davis wouldn't have had to say that. The National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and others have stepped up to help those affected, even as some of their volunteers have lost jobs and housing. Social media remains packed with fundraisers to buy new equipment for gardeners, patronize food vendors and find jobs for the unemployed. Such efforts bring comfort to Davis' widow, Alessandra Moctezuma, and their son, James Davis. In a phone call from their home in San Diego, the two told me how they've grieved the tragedy in L.A. from afar. Moctezuma attended Palisades High and hiked above Altadena with Davis while he was writing 'Ecology of Fear' in the mid-1990s. On social media, she saw photos of her alma mater in flames, posts from friends who lost everything in Palisades and videos of hills burned beyond recognition. 'He loved it up there,' she said, remembering that they lived in Pasadena, just seven minutes from Eaton Canyon. 'I was already feeling all the emotions from that, and that's when people started sharing Mike's articles.' She and James are grateful that people are citing Davis as a way to cope with the calamities of the past month — but the two urge readers to go beyond his best-known quotes and works. 'The problem is a lot of people misinterpret a lot of my dad's work as schadenfreude, when it's really not,' James said. The 21-year-old feels his father was, above all, trying to warn about the dangers of unchecked development, especially in more recent writings. In the pages of the London Review of Books and the Nation, Davis tracked how California had changed during his lifetime, from a state with a wildfire season centered mostly on wilderness areas to one where the menace of conflagrations is year-round — and everywhere. James recalled a 2021 documentary in which a gaunt, gravelly-voiced Davis told an interviewer, 'Could Los Angeles burn? The urban fabric itself? Absolutely,' over shots of burning suburban tracts that looked eerily like what happened in Altadena and the Palisades. 'He talks about not just the possibility but inevitability about how there could be a giant fire burning down Sunset Boulevard,' James said. 'That's exactly what happened.' With his love for Southern California and its people, Davis would 'be happy to see all the mutual aid happening," James said. "That's the kind of stuff he advocated for.' Moctezuma, an artist and curator, agreed. Her students at Mesa College filled four big U-Hauls with supplies and drove to Pasadena. 'Just seeing everyone sharing, that's one of the things Mike always talked about,' Moctezuma said. 'The kindness of people and importance of organizing — and the next step is organizing ourselves to help ourselves." She recounted one of her late husband's favorite Irish proverbs: Under the shelter of one another, people live. 'I'm sure he'd have a lot of things to say right now,' Moctezuma continued. 'He'd probably start looking into all sorts of things — the response from firefighters and politicians, regular people. Everyone would be interviewing him." Then she got quiet. 'He'd be heartbroken to see everything burnt down. And if his health was good, he'd be up there helping.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Eric Adams Case Tests an Ambitious Prosecutor's Independence
Danielle R. Sassoon shot like a laser through the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, with stints fighting violent crime and securities fraud as well as handling appeals before she was elevated, at age 38, to be its interim head. There, just weeks into her tenure running the country's most prestigious federal prosecutor's office, she encountered an obstacle that has threatened to stall her rapid rise: the desire of President Trump's administration to drop corruption charges against New York City's mayor, Eric Adams. Given her experience — and bulletproof conservative credentials as a member of the Federalist Society — Ms. Sassoon seemed ready to lead an office that saw tumultuous times during Mr. Trump's first term, when he fired two of its U.S. attorneys. In recent days, prosecutors have been watching Ms. Sassoon anxiously to see how she might respond to the Justice Department's demand that she drop the Adams case, which she had supported in a court filing. She has had long experience standing up for her values before skeptical audiences. Now she has to mediate between an office where that kind of independence is prized and an administration that has given an explicitly political order to end the Adams prosecution. Through a spokesman, Ms. Sassoon declined to comment for this article. Before the Adams case vaulted her into the spotlight, her life had been characterized by achievement that was noteworthy even in environments where achievement is the norm. Born and raised in New York City, she attended the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where she was first in her class and received awards for academic excellence. In high school, she spent hours each day studying the Talmud, an effort that she has said prepared her to study law. Rebecca Kaden, a close friend who met Ms. Sassoon right before they began their freshman year at Harvard University, said she always knew Ms. Sassoon would be a lawyer. The future U.S. attorney was cerebral, a dynamic thinker eager to discuss and debate ideas. She wrote columns about Middle East politics for the student newspaper, one of them in her role as press secretary of Harvard Students for Israel, as well as a soft-focus profile of a classmate for 'Scene,' a friend's magazine project. One of her classes, 'Justice,' was taught by the professor Michael J. Sandel, in a packed auditorium of hundreds of students, some of whose comments received enthusiastic applause. In that class, Ms. Sassoon stood and delivered an outspoken argument against race-based affirmation action. 'You could argue that affirmative action perpetuates divisions between the races, rather than achieving the ultimate goal of race being an irrelevant factor in our society,' she said. There was no applause when she finished. But if she was unafraid to speak frankly with her peers, Ms. Sassoon could be soft-spoken with the mentors on campus. A family friend introduced her to the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who soon brought her on as a research assistant. Mr. Dershowitz said that Ms. Sassoon understood 'all sides of all arguments' but recalled her as 'diffident, reserved' and 'shy.' 'She'll very politely and very gently challenge you,' Mr. Dershowitz said, adding, 'She was always interested in public service.' After graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 2008, Ms. Sassoon attended Yale Law School, known for its focus on public interest law. She graduated in 2011 and served in consecutive clerkships for conservative judges. The first, J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the federal appeals court for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., recalled Ms. Sassoon as whip-smart and versatile — equally at home in the higher precincts of appellate law and before a jury. He said he would not comment 'in any way, shape or form' on decisions that Ms. Sassoon faces in the Adams case or in others. He added: 'All I would say is that Danielle is someone who's very principled and rigorously honest and plays it straight.' She later clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia, a giant of the conservative legal movement. In an essay after his death in 2016, she wrote, 'Justice Scalia was my kind of feminist. 'He spared me no argumentative punches and demanded rigor from my work,' she added. 'He taught me how to fire a pistol and a rifle, and made me feel like I had grit. He thickened my skin, which was the best preparation for a career in a male-dominated field.' The year that she wrote the essay, Ms. Sassoon, a registered Republican, began working as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office, where political neutrality is a paramount value. Hired into the Southern District of New York under Preet Bharara, who had been appointed by President Barack Obama, she whisked through the general crimes and narcotics units before focusing on violent crime and securities fraud. She handled eight trials, including two murder cases. In one trial, she won the conviction of Lawrence V. Ray on charges of extortion and sex trafficking related to his abuse of Sarah Lawrence College students. He received 60 years in prison. She is best known for the fraud prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Ms. Sassoon grilled Mr. Bankman-Fried in a four-hour cross-examination, skewering him with a rat-a-tat line of questioning that contrasted his public statements with his private conduct. The columnist Joe Nocera, after observing the back and forth, wrote in The Free Press that Mr. Bankman-Fried was 'a dead man walking.' He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. In 2023, under the U.S. attorney at the time, Damian Williams, Ms. Sassoon was promoted to co-chief of the criminal appeals unit, where she most likely would have reviewed the legal particulars of some of the office's highest-profile cases — including its prosecution of Mayor Adams. That was the position she held last month when the Trump administration elevated her to temporarily lead the office. Her tenure was expected to be relatively brief. She has a baby due in mid-March, and President Trump's choice to lead the office permanently, Jay Clayton, is expected to sail through the Senate confirmation process. She has been an active leader, attending social gatherings held by the office's units and recently appearing in court to observe the sentencing of Robert Menendez, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey, on corruption charges. He received 11 years in prison. Shortly after being named the interim U.S. attorney last month, Ms. Sassoon became involved in conversations about the case against Mayor Adams. On Jan. 31, she traveled to Washington, D.C., for an in-person meeting at the Justice Department to discuss the possibility of dropping the charges. To friends, she seemed unfazed: Two days after the meeting, she and her husband, Adam Katz, threw a birthday party for her young daughter (Mr. Katz is co-founder of the investment firm Irenic Capital Management.) This week, the department's acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, ordered Ms. Sassoon to drop the case in a memo, directing that she dismiss the pending charges 'as soon as is practicable.' Ms. Sassoon cannot dismiss the charges herself. She — or a prosecutor in her office — would have to ask the judge overseeing the case to do so. After Mr. Bove's memo became public, veterans of the office quickly began to discuss among themselves how Ms. Sassoon might respond. This month, Ms. Sassoon published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which she criticized President Biden for commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 'supposedly nonviolent offenders' without consulting the prosecutors or judges involved. Ms. Sassoon wrote: 'The lack of a considered decision-making process exhibited a disregard for the work and knowledge of prosecutors and judges. 'At this time of transition,' Ms. Sassoon added, 'I look forward to doing my part to ensure that prosecutors can resume their noble work unimpeded, outside the limelight and in service of the public.'
