"Find a coward to file your motion": Adams prosecutor resigns after being asked to drop charges

The lead prosecutor of New York City Mayor Eric Adams' corruption case has resigned over Department of Justice orders to dismiss the federal charges.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten's resignation came shortly after that of Danielle Sassoon, formerly the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Scotten's stepping down came with a blistering letter to acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, accusing the senior man at the DOJ of making a "mistake."

Scotten lambasted Bove's reasoning for wanting the case dismissed, taking particular offense at the idea that Adams' case should be dismissed so that the Trump administration could strong-arm him into cooperating with the president's immigration initiatives. 

 “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” Scotten wrote. 

Donald Trump's border czar Tom Homan made the threat explicit during a stop by "Fox & Friends" on Friday. While sitting next to Adams, Homan laid out a deal between the mayor and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to operate on Rikers Island.

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

Scotten said the inherent threat was beneath the Department of Justice.

"Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” Scotten wrote. “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.”

Scotten was the seventh DOJ official to resign over Bove's order. After the department's public integrity section considered resigning en masse, prosecutor Ed Sullivan volunteered to file the motion and save his colleagues the trouble.

"This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion," an unnamed source briefed on the meeting told Reuters. "That person, in my mind, is a hero."