The Thursday Night Massacre: Why Top Prosecutors Resigned Rather Than Drop This Case

​​Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of anti-Trump “Resistance” warriors.

Sassoon is a Harvard-and-Yale-trained member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, and a former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who anchored the Supreme Court’s conservative wing for decades.

Danielle Sassoon

Scotten, who served three combat tours in Iraq, clerked for two Republican Supreme Court appointees, John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. (His time clerking for Kavanaugh came before President Trump tapped the jurist for the Supreme Court.)

Hagan Scotten

Both Sassoon and Scotten are registered Republicans.

And yet, last week, when Trump administration officials ordered DOJ prosecutors to dismiss the criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, it was Sassoon and Scotten who took a stand.

They each refused to comply, writing blistering resignation letters in which they effectively alleged that Adams’ indictment was only being dropped because of a political deal between the mayor and the president.

“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote in his resignation letter. “But it was never going to be me.”

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The saga that has roiled both Washington’s legal elite and New York’s political circles can be traced back to last September, when the Biden Justice Department initially indicted Adams, a Democrat who had sometimes crossed swords with President Biden.

At the time, federal prosecutors accused Adams of bribery, alleging that he accepted luxury travel and other benefits from Turkish officials and businessmen in exchange for pressuring the New York City Fire Department to speed the opening of a Turkish consular building that had failed its fire inspection.

Eric Adams

The first sitting mayor of the Big Apple to be indicted, he was also charged with conspiracy, fraud, and soliciting foreign campaign donations.

Adams denied the charges and pledged to fight them in court — until suddenly, he didn’t need to. Shortly after Trump returned to office, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed Sassoon, whose office was in charge of the case, to dismiss the indictment.

According to Sassoon, Adams’ lawyers had approached Bove with “what amounted to a quid pro quo,” in which the mayor would help the Trump administration carry out its immigration agenda in exchange for his charges being dropped.

Sassoon refused to be part of such a deal. “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” she wrote in a sharply worded letter.

Bove responded by arguing that the Adams prosecution never should have been brought in the first place, alleging that it w

as done as an act of career advancement by Sassoon’s predecessor and as a political move by the Biden administration to silence a critic.

Emil Bove

He then transferred the case to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C. and directed the section’s leader to do what Sassoon wouldn’t. But once again, that prosecutor resigned rather than drop the case.

Ultimately, seven federal prosecutors in New York and D.C. resigned rather than enacting Bove’s order to drop the charges. Some Justice Department lawyers began referring to the episode as the “Thursday Night Massacre,” a reference to a storied moment in department history: the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” when a pair of top officials resigned rather than follow an order by President Richard Nixon to fire a prosecutor who had been investigating him.

The next day, Bove assembled the staff of the Public Integrity Section for a high-stakes meeting. Two of them needed to step forward in the next hour to dismiss the charges against Adams, he said. Many reportedly interpreted the directive as a threat that he would fire them all if they refused.

In the end, Ed Sullivan — a veteran prosecutor already nearing retirement — said he would do it, in order to protect his colleagues from being fired. “Many in the group considered Mr. Sullivan’s decision to step forward an honorable act,” the New York Times reported.

Another prosecutor who is seen as being more aligned with Bove also signed on; together, they submitted a motion on Friday requesting that Adams’ case be dismissed.

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But questions still linger over the future of Adams’ criminal case — and his political career.

Technically, for a criminal case to be dismissed, a federal judge has to sign off. This is usually just a formality, but Judge Dale Ho — who is overseeing the case — signaled at a hearing Wednesday that he wouldn’t necessarily treat it that way.

After a 90-minute session — during which Bove argued that the government’s move was a “standard exercise of prosecutorial discretion” — Ho declined to accept or reject the motion to dismiss the case. “I’m grateful for your patience as I consider these issues carefully,” he told the prosecutors, calling it a “somewhat unusual situation.”

“To exercise my discretion properly, I am not going to shoot from my hip right here on the bench,” Ho added.

Meanwhile, the resignation epidemic is spreading to New York, where Democratic leaders aren’t happy about the appearance that their mayor is striking deals with Donald Trump to avoid prosecution. Earlier this week, four of Adams’ closest advisers stepped down, unleashing chaos in the city’s government.

Other officials are investigating avenues to get Adams out of office.

According to an obscure provision of New York’s Constitution, the state’s governor has the power to remove the New York City mayor. This has never happened before, although Franklin Roosevelt came close to invoking the provision when he was governor. The mayor at the time, who was being investigated for corruption, ended up resigning.

Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, signaled in a statement on Monday that she was considering the option; she met with city leaders on Tuesday to discuss it.

Kathy Hochul

New York City law also allows a group of five city officials to convene an “Inability Committee” that could vote to declare the mayor physically or mentally unable to hold office. If four of the five officials deem the mayor unable, he can be removed by a two-thirds vote of the city council.

One of the officials empowered to convene the committee is already threatening to do so.

For his part, even as his deputies resign, Adams says he isn’t going anywhere. “I’m not stepping down. I’m stepping up,” he said on Sunday. The next day, the mayor compared his plight to a “modern-day ‘Mein Kampf,’” bizarrely choosing to invoke the title of Adolf Hitler’s memoir, which translates to mean “My Struggle.”

Adams has denied the allegations of a quid pro quo with Trump. But, at the same time, he has been stepping up his cooperation with the administration in recent days, just as his lawyers allegedly promised. On Friday, Adams sat down for a joint interview with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to announce a deal that will allow immigration agents to operate at New York City’s Rikers Island jail.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch,” Homan said. “I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

Homan later clarified that he was referring only to the agreement over Rikers, not a broader deal involving the Justice Department. But a conspicuous detail buried in the shuffle of resignation letters and legal motions was hard to overlook.

When the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges against Adams, they did so “without prejudice” — a legal term of art that would allow prosecutors to revive the indictment down the line if they ever want to.