Three senior Justice Department officials, including Manhattan's top federal prosecutor, resigned on Thursday rather than comply with an order to dismiss corruption charges against New York City's mayor, according to an internal Justice Department memo seen by Reuters and people familiar with the matter.
The departures mark a sign of resistance from career Justice Department officials to President Donald Trump's efforts to overhaul the agency to end what he calls its weaponization against political opponents. Critics say Trump's changes threaten to subject criminal prosecutions to political whims.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, the Trump administration's recent pick to temporarily lead the office prosecuting New York Mayor Eric Adams, resigned her post on Thursday, according to the memorandum by Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a Trump appointee.
Bove had ordered Sassoon to dismiss the case on Monday, in what legal experts called an effort by Trump administration officials to assert control over a prosecutor's office that has long prided itself on independence from politics. Adams, a Democrat, has forged ties with Trump, a Republican.
In his Thursday memo, Bove wrote that Sassoon had refused to comply with what he called his office's finding that the case against Adams amounted to "weaponization" of the justice system.
"Your office has no authority to contest the weaponization finding," wrote Bove, Trump's former personal criminal defense lawyer. "The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination."
Bove wrote that the two main trial prosecutors on the Adams case would be placed on leave. He also said his office would take over the Adams case and move to dismiss it, though no formal motion to dismiss had been filed yet on Thursday afternoon.
A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York confirmed Sassoon's resignation. It was not immediately clear who would take her place.
According to a person briefed on the matter, after Sassoon refused to comply with the directive to dismiss the case, the Trump administration directed John Keller, the acting head of the Justice Department's public corruption unit, to do so.
Keller also resigned on Thursday, two people familiar with the matter said. Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the department's criminal division, has also resigned, one of the people said.
A Justice Department official confirmed the resignations.
Since Trump began his second term in the White House on January 20, the new administration fired more than a dozen prosecutors who pursued criminal charges against Trump in two cases brought in 2023, and terminated some FBI officials and prosecutors who pursued cases against Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to block Congress from certifying his election loss.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, in her first day on the job last week, issued a directive stating that Justice Department lawyers who decline to appear in court or sign briefs would be disciplined and possibly fired.
The resignations sparked comparisons from legal experts to the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973, when senior Justice Department officials resigned after refusing President Richard Nixon's order to fire the special counsel investigating the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.
Juliet Sorensen, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, also said the resignations were reminiscent of Trump's decision in his first term to fire former FBI director James Comey to stop the bureau from investigating his 2016 presidential campaign.
"In both of those historical instances, as with the events of today, you have the chief executive of the United States bringing extreme political pressure by virtue of their high office against non-political Department of Justice personnel," Sorensen said.
SOUTHERN DISTRICT HAS TRADITION OF INDEPENDENCE
A half-dozen former SDNY prosecutors told Reuters this week that the order from Bove, himself a former SDNY prosecutor who also served as Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer, raised questions about whether the office can remain independent of political pressure during Trump's second White House term.
Last September, Sassoon's predecessor Damian Williams - a Biden appointee - charged Adams with accepting bribes from Turkish officials.
Adams pleaded not guilty and has argued the charges were brought as retaliation for his criticism of Biden's immigration policies. Trump, whose two federal cases were dismissed after his election victory but who was convicted on separate state-level charges, has expressed sympathy for Adams. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he did not request the Justice Department drop the case against Adams.
Bove wrote that the case was distracting Adams from helping Trump crack down on illegal immigration, one of the Republican president's top priorities.
Harry Sandick, a former SDNY federal prosecutor, said Sassoon "displayed courage and a respect for the traditions of the office by declining to follow an order that she apparently viewed as unjust."
Driscoll, who has been with the department for more than two decades, oversaw the criminal division's money laundering and asset recovery and public integrity sections.
Keller, who reported to Driscoll, has been with the department since 2010. He only became the acting head of the public integrity section recently, after the former chief Corey Amundson resigned when Trump-appointed officials tried to reassign him to an immigration-focused unit.
