For the past three weeks, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have blitzed through the federal government. Firing thousands of workers, closing down federal agencies, allowing Musk’s minions to have access to Americans’ personal data through the invasion of the Treasury Department, and on and on. Judges around the country have been called on to stop or at least slow down the madness. When Trump’s Justice Department tried to corrupt the legal system for blatant political reasons, Danielle Sassoon said, not on my watch. Sassoon was the thirty-eight year old US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. She was appointed three weeks earlier as an interim prosecutor until Trump’s pick for the office was confirmed by the Senate. Then it happened.
Her office had brought criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges, including taking bribes from Turkish officials. He was scheduled to go on trial in April. She got a directive from Trump henchman Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to dismiss the charges against Adams. Bove’s reason was that this would distract from Adams’s re-election campaign and after Adams’s lawyers said Adams would go along with Trump’s crackdown on illegal migrants if the case was dropped. Earlier Adams’s lawyer had raised the issue of a pardon for the mayor. This was the Justice Department agreeing to drop criminal charges for political purposes. In a letter to the new Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon wrote, “I understand my duty as a prosecutor to mean enforcing the law impartially, and that includes prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, to the defendant or to those who appointed me.” Sassoon resigned. The Justice Department dropped the charges against Adams.
Sassoon is no liberal Democrat. She clerked for Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She wrote that Scalia, “…thickened my, skin, which was the best preparation for an career in a male-dominated field.” She is also a member of the right leaning Federalist Society. She had been in the US Attorney’s office since 2016 and handled high profile cases. When Sassoon was asked by her college newspaper years ago how she would she describe herself, she said “Independent.”
Sassoon was willing to give up her job rather than cave in to crushing pressure from one of the most powerful institutions in the world. She put it in very clear language in her letter to the Attorney General. “It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.”
The past three weeks have shown us the country is in dangerous waters. We can only blame ourselves if we let the very foundation of the country be jolted beyond recovery. We should all admire Danielle Sassoon for standing up for what is right regardless of the cost. We are going to need more heroes to rise.
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