Meet the acting US attorney who quit over Eric Adams case
Danielle Sassoon had been nominated to the position of acting U.S. attorney for the Sountern District of New York three weeks ago by the Trump Administration. (U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York via AP)
NEW YORK - Long before she made headlines by defying a Trump administration order to drop criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, prosecutor Danielle Sassoon clerked for two very conservative judges: J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She cited those clerkships in her resignation letter Thursday to Attorney General Pam Bondi, explaining that her fealty to the law would not allow her to seek dismissal of the Adams case.
Rather than do that, the 38-year-old attorney said, she would relinquish the acting U.S. attorney post she’d been given by the Trump administration three weeks earlier.
“Both men instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law, and a commitment to reasoned and thorough analysis,” Sassoon wrote in the letter, referring to Wilkinson and Scalia. “I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record.”
A top deputy to Bondi, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, responded to the letter by accusing Sassoon of insubordination and vowing to investigate her behavior and that of her team.
Five Justice Department officials in Washington quit as well.
Sassoon is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and a graduate of Yale Law School. After several years in private practice, she joined the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in 2016 and made her mark leading some of its most high-profile cases.
She helped to lead the office’s prosecution of FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March for orchestrating a massive fraud on customers. Sassoon also won a criminal conviction against Larry Ray, who subjected students from Sarah Lawrence College to years of physical and emotional abuse in a cultlike atmosphere.
Sassoon is a registered Republican and a member of the conservative Federalist Society. After U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, an appointee of President Joe Biden, stepped down at the end of the Biden administration, Trump officials asked Sassoon to run the office until his permanent nominee for the position, Jay Clayton, completes the Senate confirmation process.
But Sassoon told Bondi on Thursday that she could no longer keep that position, because she could not carry out Bove’s demand to drop the Adams case.
Bove, a former Trump defense attorney and New York federal prosecutor, said in a memo that he wanted to dismiss the charges not because of the evidence or the merits of the case, but because it could impede Adams’s reelection bid and his efforts to fight crime and illegal immigration, top priorities of the Trump administration.
“The reasons advanced by Mr. Bove for dismissing the indictment are not ones I can in good faith defend as in the public interest and as consistent with the principles of impartiality and fairness that guide my decision-making,” Sassoon wrote in her letter to Bondi, which quoted the attorney general’s vow to end what she calls weaponization of the Justice Department.
“In your words, ‘the Department of Justice will not tolerate abuses of the criminal justice process, coercive behavior, or other forms of misconduct,’” the letter said. “Dismissal of the indictment for no other reason than to influence Adams’s mayoral decision-making would be all three.”
Related article:
Senior DOJ officials resign after order to drop case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams
Alice Crites and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.
