Daniel Richman
Every occupying force knows the tactic: If you want to cow a large population, pick one of its most respected citizens and demand he debase himself and pledge fealty. If he refuses, execute him and move on to the next one. This is how the Trump Justice Department thinks it will bring U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country under its control, starting last week with the Southern District of New York. Firing or demanding the resignation of a previous administration’s top prosecutors has become standard. After all, elections matter, and a new president should be free to set new priorities.
But the Trump Justice Department’s twisted loyalty game is something new, dangerous and self-defeating. And this round probably won’t be the last.
In instructing the Southern District to drop the case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general, found a useful loyalty test. In his letter to Danielle Sassoon, the interim Southern District U.S. attorney, Mr. Bove gave two transparently inappropriate reasons: a baseless claim that the prosecution was politicized, which her powerful resignation letter demolished, and a barely concealed suggestion that a dismissal would provide leverage over Mr. Adams and ensure his cooperation in the administration’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants. As Hagan Scotten, who led the Adams prosecution and has also resigned, nicely put it, “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.”
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