3 Eric Adams prosecutors won't confess 'wrongdoing when there was none,' their resignation letter says
New York City Mayor Eric Adams attends President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. (Photo by Tom Brenner/The Washington Post)
Three federal prosecutors who worked on the dropped corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams have submitted their emailed resignation letter, saying they won’t accept a requirement to “express regret and admit some wrongdoing” by their office when it refused to dismiss the case.
“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorneys Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom, who worked in the Southern District of New York.
The New York Times, Reuters and Bloomberg Law are among the publications with stories on the letter, dated April 22.
The three prosecutors had been placed on leave after their office resisted orders to drop the case against Adams, which accused him of facilitating approval of the new Turkish Consulate in New York City after receiving travel and gifts from the Turkish government. Adams maintained his innocence.
The prosecutors say they apparently were required to confess wrongdoing in return for getting their jobs back.
The Department of Justice “has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong,” they wrote.
The three assistant U.S. attorneys are among at least 11 federal prosecutors who left as a result of the orders to dismiss the case. One of them was interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the dismissed prosecution in a statement published by Bloomberg Law.
“There was nothing ‘illegal’ or ‘unethical’ about the Department of Justice dismissing the flawed prosecution against Mayor Adams. Any suggestion to the contrary by anybody, especially former federal prosecutors, is wrong and disingenuous,” Blanche said.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho of the Southern District of New York dismissed the case earlier this month at the DOJ’s request. But he criticized the circumstances.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” he wrote.
He also said there was “zero” evidence of “improper motives” by prosecutors.
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