Thursday Night Massacre

A Scandal That’s Not Going Away Soon

The resignations we have seen in the last 24 hours of high-ranking Department of Justice officials constitute the biggest scandal to date facing the Trump administration.

The episode, moreover, is developing in nightmarish ways for Acting Deputy Attorney General Bove and the Department. And it’s not going away soon.

The ugly episode started when Bove sent a remarkable letter to the Acting United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon. The letter directed Sassoon to move the court to dismiss the charges that her office had previously brought against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

The Adams case turns on over $100,000 worth of improper gratuities and goodies that Adams took. The facts are complicated and involve Turkish actors and events before Adams was elected. But that's not the real story here. The huge headline is that in ordering them to drop the case, Deputy Attorney General Bove wrote, "I have not in any way based this on the evidence in the case or any legal theories." In other words, not the facts and not the law—the absolute constitutive elements of any prosecution or dismissal by the Department of Justice.

Bove’s letter was ill-considered and intemperate. The most glaring aspect of it, apart from its overbearing tone, was its candid admission that the order was unrelated to any weakness in either the facts or the law.

A few days passed during which Sassoon obviously was contemplating how to react. Ordering the dismissal of a case for reasons unrelated to the facts or the law is a serious violation of the Department’s most fundamental principle. The idea that prosecutorial decisions should be based on facts and law is at the very core of the notion that prosecutors make decisions without fear or favor.

Sassoon, to her great and lasting credit, understood the principle. She upped the ante with a letter to AG Bondi leading with this very point. She noted that the charges against the mayor were serious and “supported by fact and law” and that Bove’s memo “directs me to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury, for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case.” She made it clear that complying with the order would violate her oath of office and her duty of candor to the court.

At this point, the lines were already drawn, and Sassoon had staked out a position clearly on the rule of law side. She was, and is, a formidable opponent for the Department: installed by Trump himself in the position, she has impeccable conservative credentials as a former clerk to Antonin Scalia and J. Harvey Wilkinson, and she is a member of the Federalist Society. Her eight-page letter to Bondi was cool in tone and clearly, even irresistibly, reasoned.

Bondi punted the issue to Bove, who responded Thursday with an ill-considered and overlong letter (eight pages, with some particularly problematic footnotes) that he will come to regret. The tone was nasty, if not vicious. It pilloried Sassoon for “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution, despite an express instruction to dismiss the case.” It suggested she had violated her DOJ oath by interpreting the law “in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected president.”

Bove began his letter high-handedly by ‘accepting’ Sassoon’s resignation, which she had only offered conditionally if Bove or Bondi refused to meet with her. He went on to insert himself into the morass of whether Adams had been trying to curry favor by cooperating with the Trump administration’s immigration policies in return for dropping the case. The airing of the evidence of those charges will likely be an unwelcome consequence for Adams in this whole imbroglio.

But Bove’s bottom-line argument was that Sassoon had refused to accept the conclusion of the new Department leadership that the prosecution of Adams had been “weaponized.” That would imply that the case lacked factual support—a point he had already conceded. So, in effect, he was instructing Sassoon that she needed to agree to false facts and represent them in court, in derogation of her oath to the Constitution and the courts.

The claim of weaponization is completely Orwellian—it’s like saying you must accept that the sun is shining at midnight. Lawyers have duties of candor to the court, and if they go up and say the prosecution is weaponized, they’re essentially lying to the court.

The fallout has been quick and monumental, more significant even than the Saturday Night Massacre of Watergate. Sassoon’s prosecutorial team, which concurred with her, includes Hagan Scotten, a John Roberts clerk who won two Bronze Stars for military service in Iraq and graduated first in his class from Harvard.

After Sassoon resigned, Bove brought the case into the storied Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division at Main Justice. He presumably assumed that the officials there would salute and follow his orders.

Vance's Dangerous Head Fake

It was a bad miscalculation. As of this writing, multiple top officials in the section have resigned rather than carry out the order. Bove thereafter brought the case to the umbrella criminal division. The acting chief of that division has also resigned rather than dismiss the Adams case.

We are talking about very senior officials in the Department of Justice. Their conduct has undoubtedly had a seismic impact within the entire Department. Add Sassoon and her team to the company, and you have an all-star squad of righteous Department officials against a few patently political Trump toadies.

The latest as I write is rampant, mind-bending rumors that the new guard has put all of the public integrity attorneys in a room, some 22 of them, and given them an hour to choose someone to sign a dismissal of the Adams case, or all of them will be fired. This prospect sounds too crazy to be true but with what’s happened in the last 24 hours, it—or some version of it (Jamie Raskin has just reported receiving similar rumors)—can’t just be dismissed as beyond the pale; we already are very far beyond the pale. I include it just to give you the latest state of play. Even assuming it’s false, Bove and company’s overall thuggery, and their treatment of career professionals as truant school children, are already clear from the written record. The damage to the Department’s culture and reputation will be immense.

And one of the attorneys in SDNY has submitted a blistering resignation letter that makes clear that he is not an opponent of the administration. “But 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. 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 motions. But it was never going to be me.”

More significantly, and in contrast to either the Saturday Night Massacre or the 2021 Oval Office showdown—when the threat of top-level resignations made Trump fold his hand—there is, as of now, no stopping point. The Department is in absolute free-fall. That has never happened before, and Bondi and Bove own it completely.

Bove presumably will find a quisling prepared to move to dismiss the case, but that is far from the end of the ordeal.

In the original Saturday Night Massacre, the third person whom Nixon ordered to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox complied with the order. That was Solicitor General Robert Bork, who later became a judge and was famously denied a spot on the Supreme Court. But Bork acted in coordination with the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General to prevent an even more serious scandal in the Department, where nobody would execute Nixon’s dubious order.

Here, as of this morning, it is by no means clear how the Department of Justice will pull out of this downward spiral. Those who suggest Trump is happy because he is ridding the Department of long-time senior career officials are missing the main point. This is a no-holds-barred showdown over the rule of law, and Bondi, Bove, and Trump (who said yesterday that he knew nothing about it) are clearly on the wrong side of it.

The Perversity of Trump’s DOJ

Moreover, it is not over by a long shot. The dismissal of the case, which Bove will certainly pursue, has to be approved by the court where the Adams case is pending. That means Judge Dale Ho will be able to interrogate involved persons in the Department about why they want to dismiss the case and whether Adams has tried to leverage cooperation with Trumpian immigration policies. Ho is likely to have serious questions about the basis for dismissal. He also is likely to want to hear testimony about what happened.

Ultimately, Judge Ho could even conclude that dismissal is not in the interest of justice, as the pertinent rule, Rule 48, requires. But at every turn, the radioactive fact will be Bove’s insistence on politicizing the Department in the most corrupt way—ordering a dismissal of a righteous and solid case for spurious, political reasons.

Trump would’ve been far better off just pardoning Adams, and perhaps it will come to that. That’s the kind of decision that can be done capriciously for politicized reasons—or at least, Trump has done so already in his tenure in office.

On the one hand, the situation is tragic—a tale of transparent corruption in which very valuable and experienced public servants are being forced from the department. The personal consequences to them, and to the Department’s mission of fighting public corruption, are catastrophic. (That fact, of course, makes their conduct all the more commendable.)

On the other hand, the situation is an opportunity of the sort we have been waiting for since Trump took office and initiated the blitzkrieg on our laws and norms. It’s a clear contest between right and wrong, with high-profile facts and terms that the public can readily understand.

The lines are clearly drawn. On one side are distinguished career prosecutors, following the facts, the law, and their oaths. On the other are lawless bullies, trying to strong-arm the prosecutors into wholly improper conduct for nakedly political reasons. It falls to patriots now to keep a sharp focus on the developing standoff and show why it demonstrates the fundamental corruption and politicization of the Trump DOJ.

Talk to you later.