Attorney General Pam Bondi said she expects the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to be dismissed Friday, after seven federal prosecutors quit in protest over the Department of Justice‘s demand to toss the case.
“It’s my understanding, it is being dismissed today,” Bondi said on Fox News.
Bondi spoke after acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove promised promotions to leadership positions for remaining prosecutors in the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who would agree to sign a motion to dismiss Adams’ case.
Bove gave the prosecutors a deadline of one hour to provide him with the names of two attorneys who would sign the motion, according to NBC News.
Reuters reported later Friday that Ed Sullivan, a member of the section, volunteered to file the motion to alleviate pressure on his colleagues. The news agency did not say if Sullivan agreed to accept a promotion in exchange for his action.
“This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion,” a person briefed on the meeting told Reuters. “That person, in my mind, is a hero.”
A federal judge in Manhattan would have to sign off on any dismissal motion by the DOJ.
Bove’s video call with the section’s team came as a seventh prosecutor resigned over his controversial order to dismiss the case in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Four prosecutors who resigned Thursday included the acting Public Integrity Section chief John Keller and three other members of his team.
The latest prosecutor to quit, Hagan Scotten, in a blistering letter to Bove, said, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case.
Within hours of Sassoon quitting, Keller, the three other Public Integrity Section prosecutors, and the DOJ’s acting criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll, all resigned rather than execute Bove’s order.
Bove, while in private legal practice, previously represented President Donald Trump in his criminal hush money trial in New York last year. Trump was convicted of nearly three dozen felony counts of falsifying business records in that case, but received a sentence of no jail time or probation.
Scotten in his letter scoffed at Bove’s stated rationales for dismissing the Adams case.
Bove claimed the case interfered with Adams’ ability to “fully cooperate with the federal government” on the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policies in New York, and Bove also cited comments about Adams made by former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams.
“In short, the first justification for the motion — that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys — is so weak as to be transparently pretextual,” Scotten wrote.
“The second justification is worse,” Scotten wrote. “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.”
“There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake,” Scotten wrote.
“Some will view the mistake you are committing here in light of their generally negative views of the new Administration,” he wrote. “I do not share those views.”
The prosecutor, referring to Trump, wrote, “I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful deal.”
“But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” Scotten wrote.
Scotten is a Harvard Law School graduate who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower court.
Bove on Thursday had placed Scotten on administrative leave along with another prosecutor on the Adams case, Derek Wikstrom.
Bove in a letter to Sassoon said he was taking that step after she indicated that Scotten and Wikstrom agreed with her decision to refuse to drop the case, and were “unwilling to comply with the order to dismiss this case.”
Bove said the prosecutors would be investigated by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility for their conduct, along with Sassoon. Bondi then would determine if Scotten and the prosecutors should be fired, Bove wrote.
