Top federal prosecutor resigns after being told to drop Eric Adams charges

The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan resigned on Thursday rather than obey a justice department order to drop corruption charges against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams.

The resignation of Danielle Sassoon, a Republican who was the interim US attorney for the southern district of New York, was confirmed by a spokesperson for the office.

Her resignation came days after a senior justice department official directed New York prosecutors to drop the federal criminal case against Adams, who was accused of accepting illegal campaign contributions and bribes of free or discounted travel from people who wanted to buy his influence.

The US acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, said in a memo on Monday that the case should be dismissed so that Adams, a Democrat, could help with Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and campaign for re-election as the city’s mayor this December.

Justice department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did Adams’s attorney, Alex Spiro. A spokesperson for the mayor did not immediately respond.

The justice department’s decision to end the case because of political considerations, rather than the strength or weakness of the evidence, alarmed some career prosecutors who said it was a departure from longstanding norms.

While Bove had directed that the case be dismissed as soon as “practicable”, days went by with no public statements or actions by the prosecution team in New York.

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said on Wednesday that she would “look into” why the charges had yet to be dismissed.

Sassoon, a former clerk for the late US supreme court justice Antonin Scalia who is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, was not the one who brought the case against Adams last year. The prosecutor who did, the former US attorney Damian Williams, stepped down after Trump’s election victory last November.

Sassoon was tapped to serve as acting US attorney on 21 January, the day after Trump took office.

The office she led until Thursday is among the largest and most prominent prosecutor’s offices in the US, with a long track record of tackling Wall Street malfeasance, political corruption and international terrorism.

It has a tradition of independence from Washington, which has earned it the nickname “the sovereign district”.