Major Embarrassment for Donald Trump Administration as Six Prosecutors, Including Manhattan’s Top Federal Prosecutor Danielle Sassoon, Resign

In a major embarrassment for the Donald Trump Administration six prosecutors have resigned after a Department of Justice order asking them to dismiss corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. It included two senior federal prosecutors in Washington.

The resignations are being seen as a very public rebuke to instructions issued by the Trump administration’s new Justice Department leadership pertaining to one of the most high profile corruption cases against a sitting Mayor.

Emil Bove , the acting U.S. deputy attorney general in a note issued on Monday instructed the federal prosecutors to drop charges against Mayor Adams contending that the action derailed his ability to tackle alien immigrants and violent crimes. The resignation of the prosecutors happened soon afterwards.

One of the prosecutors who resigned is Ms Danielle Sassoon and she is known as Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor. She has handled a number of high profile cases in the Southern District of New York, including the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

In her resignation letter which Sassoon forwarded to Attorney General Pam Bondi alleged that pressure was continuously being exerted on prosecutors to close corruption cases against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and it amounted to quid pro quo to forward Trump’s anti immigration policy.

Sassoon wrote,

“I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationale for dismissal,”.

The first of its kind in the city’s modern history, the Department of Justice initiated public corruption charges against Adams, a Democrat. Mr Adams has pleaded not guilty and the case is set to begin this spring.

Who Is Danielle Sassoon?

Danielle Sassoon is a graduate who passed out from the Yale Law School, graduating in 2011. She assisted federal appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III and the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, both staunch conservatives. She later worked as a litigation lawyer at a Washington law firm and was also employed as professor at New York University law school

She handled violent and organized crime units during her stint as an assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York in 2016. Some of the high profile cases she handled were the Lawrence Ray case in which he was convicted for money laundering, sex trafficking, and forced labor and was sentenced to sixty years in prison. She also handled the Sam Bankman-Fried trial in 2023 for fraud and was found guilty and sentenced for 25 years in prison.

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