With DoJ’s order to the Southern District of New York prosecutors in Manhattan to drop their bribery case against New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Eric Adams, six of those prosecutors resigned in protest. Exemplifying the trash cleanout nature of these failures and of their arrogant insistence that the prosecutors of that Southern District are independent of the DoJ, however, are the words of the seventh prosecutor to resign, Hagan Scotten, in his letter of resignation, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal.
Our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.
If no other lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
The former often is true, but regarding the naked, uncaveated, nature of it, it’s also true that prosecutorial power is, in fact, often used to influence other citizens: such influence is the stuff of plea deals, particularly those involving agreements to cooperate here in return for prosecutorial discretion there. That discretion can reach as far as completely dropping the charges against the one agreeing to cooperate. That’s number one, as someone was wont to say.
The other thing is Scotten’s name-calling and virtue-signaling that is his latter bit. That he has to call names against those who disagree with him, including those misbegotten superiors of his so impudently insisting that the heretofore far too independent-acting district should actually be subordinate to the DoJ, merely demonstrates the intellectually and legally bankrupt nature of his objections.
These seven were members of DoJ’s Public Integrity Section, consisting of roughly two dozen lawyers.
In the end, Edward Sullivan, of that section agreed to be the one to sign the filing that would ask the presiding just to drop the case. His reason for doing so, here as cited by the WSJ, is instructive: to spare other career staff in the section from potentially being fired.
The insubordinates—all seven of them—are well removed from the Department. Sullivan’s rationalization for his going along, though, suggests that the entire Section wants close inspection and further rooting out, perhaps complete replacement of the remaining incumbents.
Chad Mizelle’s long thread is pretty explanatory. He’s the Chief of Staff to AG Bondi, ]https://x.com/ChadMizelle47/status/1892268416267911251
Mizelle does have a vested interest in defending his boss’ instruction to SDNY to drop the Adams case. The Stevens case is irrelevant to his thesis in his thread, too: that involved prosecutorial misconduct in the trial, not wrongly defining federal fraud to get into the trial stage.
Still, the record is damning.
Related to this, and a propos the hooraw over the instruction to drop the case, I once asked a highly respected Federal district judge when a monetary settlement offered by a defendant in a civil case constituted bribery. His answer was that it was extremely hard to prove bribery in such a case and that courts were loath to rule in that direction, anyway, because such a conviction would work strongly against any settlement being offered or asked for by the plaintiff.
I also asked him how a judge could tell whether a criminal defendant was being bought off by a prosecutor for testimony in another criminal case with a promise of leniency in the criminal’s existing case, or whether the defendant was being coerced into testimony by prosecutorial threats of harsher treatment. His answer here was that it was hard to prove either, although the coercion was slightly less hard.
The rules are strongly stacked–and correctly so–against the government, even regarding citizens we don’t like, even regarding politicians we don’t like.
Eric Hines