Three federal prosecutors have chosen to resign instead of admitting wrongdoing following suspensions over their handling of the now-dropped federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, saying it is the Trump administration's handling of the case that was wrong, according to a letter seen by NBC News.
Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom were assistant U.S. attorneys who were suspended after they refused to take part in the Department of Justice's move to drop the prosecution against Adams. A federal judge ordered the case permanently dropped last month so that the charges couldn't be used as "leverage" over Adams, who is cooperating with the Trump administration's immigration priorities.
The corruption case against Adams, who was elected as a Democrat but is now running for re-election as an independent, had sparked a crisis for the Justice Department in the early days of the Trump administration, leading to the biggest mass resignation of DOJ lawyers since the Watergate era.
The former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned over the move to drop the prosecution of Adams, as did several members of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section.
Sassoon said Adams' lawyers urged "what amounted to a quid pro quo" deal, a charge denied by Adams' lawyer and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten also said that the later justification for dropping the case was "so weak as to be transparently pretextual."
With the three resignations Tuesday, at least 10 lawyers have now left the Justice Department in connection with the fallout from the Adams case.
The three latest lawyers to resign had been put on administrative leave. They wrote in a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Tuesday that it was “clear that one of the preconditions you have placed on our returning to the Office is that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the Office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case."
Blanche, in response, said that 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."
In their letter, the three lawyers who resigned continued: "Serving in the Southern District of New York has been an honor. There is no greater privilege than to work for an institution whose mandate is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. We will not abandon this principle to keep our jobs. We resign."
The lawyers said they "will not confess wrongdoing when there was none," and said the Justice Department "has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington."
