Chapter 31: Moment to Decide
What Happens When the Rule of Law Meets the Rule of Trump.
“Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,/ In the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side. . . . Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside” These are verses of a poem composed by James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) in 1845. Some lines from the poem were set to music in 1890.1 It is now a hymn often sung in Protestant churches.
Danielle Sassoon’s “moment to decide” came on February 12. Sassoon was appointed acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York on January 21 by none other than Donald Trump, the day after his inauguration. On February 12, she wrote a lengthy letter to Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, requesting a meeting and saying that she would resign rather than drop the corruption charges against the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.2
Adams was indicted for bribery, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions on September 26, 2024. He thus achieved the distinction of being the first mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. Adams keeps insisting that the charges are “entirely false, based on lies.” “I will request an immediate trial so New Yorkers can hear the truth.”3 (Events were to show that he was not altogether sincere in that last statement.)
Soon after the indictment, Trump began saying nice things about Adams, and for his part, Adams said that Trump was not a “fascist,” soon after the Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that he was.4 Trump was trying to woo Black male voters, and he apparently thought Adams, himself Black, could lend a hand.
There was a lot Trump could do for Adams in return after the election. On January 17, 2025, Adams met with Trump near Mar-a-Lago. Trump had said in December that he and Adams had something in common – both men had been “persecuted” by political prosecutions.5 Rumors swirled that Adams wanted not his trial but rather a pardon. In February, Trump found a different way to help out his newfound friend. He had his justice department tell Sassoon to drop the Adams case. She refused.
Who is Danielle Sassoon? Why did she refuse to drop the case?
Sassoon was born in New York City to Jewish parents in 1986. Her grandmother escaped from Syria to avoid persecution resulting from the 1948 war. Sassoon had an orthodox Jewish education prior to entering Harvard, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 2008. The next step was the Yale Law School where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, graduating in 2011. Then onto a clerkship with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U. S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. From July 2012 to August 2013 she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) of the Supreme Court. Following the Scalia clerkship, she went into private practice. In 2016, she became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where she was a star prosecutor.6 She is a member of the Federalist Society, a well-known right wing group whose members include six of the nine Supreme Court justices.
Her career trajectory put Sassoon on the express train to a seat on the Supreme Court. Very smart, perhaps even brilliant. Only 38 years old so she could be expected to serve forever. And very conservative. In a word, made to order.
If all this were not enough, Sassoon has been an articulate critic of that most inarticulate of Presidents, Joe Biden. On January 17, just before his departure from public life, Biden commuted the sentences of 2,490 persons. “With this action,” Biden declared, “I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any [sic] President in US history.”7
On February 2, Sassoon published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about these commutations.8 As interim United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, she wrote that she wanted to support the line prosecutors dedicated “to pursuing justice and restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system."
“This is no small task, and it’s made more difficult by former President Biden’s 11th-hour decision to commute the sentences of nearly 2,500 “supposedly nonviolent offenders.” The devil is in the adverb “supposedly.” “The mass commutations – made without consulting the career prosecutors who handled the cases or the judges who imposed the original sentences, and apparently without regard to the underlying facts of each case – undermine our mission to keep Americans safe and administer justice fairly.”
Consider the case of Raheem Davis. He was “convicted in my district of narcotics trafficking in 2006, and also separately convicted for his role in a 2005 drug robbery where he opened fire, murdered one person, and permanently crippled another. While awaiting trial in the robbery case, Davis assaulted a corrections officer by repeatedly stabbing him in the head and neck with a shank. In imposing a lengthy sentence meant to incapacitate Davis, the judge described Davis as ‘out of control’ and ‘violent’ and worried that if ‘he’s out on the street, it is only a matter of time until more people die at his hands.’ Davis will now be out of prison this year, rather than in 2043.”9 Someone in the Biden administration failed to do his homework.
Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016. Ten days later, his former clerks gathered to pay tribute. Speaking first, Sassoon said Scalia was “the real deal. Sometimes when you peek behind the curtain of power, you suffer a rude awakening. What you find is corruption, ego, or a lack of ideals and intellectual heft. Stepping behind closed doors with Justice Scalia elevated my faith in the judiciary and deepened my love of the law.”10 Sassoon would soon have her own rude awakening – replete with corruption, ego, and the absence of ideals – in the first month of the Trump administration.
Conversations about dropping the case against Adams began soon after Trump’s inauguration on January 20. On January 31, Sassoon went to Washington, DC, to meet with top justice department officials and Adams’s lawyers. Precisely what transpired is not known, but it seems probable that that Sassoon realized then that she was going to be pressured to drop the Adams case. She knew the case was strong. Indeed, the prosecutors said they had uncovered “additional criminal conduct” by Adams, and more charges would soon be filed.11
Emil Bove III, a Trump defense attorney in 2024, and now acting number two official at the Justice Department, spoke with Adams’s lawyers about dropping the case. On February 10, Bove sent Sassoon a memorandum directing her to terminate the prosecution without prejudice. “Without prejudice” means that the case could be reopened If circumstances warranted.
This decision was reached, Bove wrote, “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Rather, the goal was to free up the mayor “to devote full attention” to dealing with illegal immigration in New York City.12
Bove’s memorandum sparked Sassoon’s letter to Trump’s new Attorney General, Pam Bondi. In eight pages of closely reasoned prose, Sassoon said she could not terminate the Adams case. The case was strong and brought by prosecutors who acted strictly in accord with the letter and the spirit of Department of Justice procedures and of the law. She was being told to drop the case because Adams’s political position would enable him to further Trump’s agenda to round up and expel immigrants.
In her January 31 meeting with Bove and Adams’s lawyers, his “attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would . . . assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” “It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to award Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.”
There is another noteworthy observation about the January 31 meeting. Sassoon writes that “Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.” Is a demand like this common at such a meeting? Why were the notes surrendered? Why did not Sassoon and her team simply refuse to hand them over? What is clear is that any meeting with Bove should be recorded.
Adams, who is as honest as Trump, has already used the Bove memorandum of February 10 “to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on ‘fanfare and sensational claims.’’’ This is untrue.
The Trump administration proposed, Sassoon explained, to use “the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure.”13 Indeed, soon after Sassoon’s letter, Tom Homan, Trump’s borders czar, appeared with Adams on “Fox and Friends.” He said – on the air – that “I came to New York City and I wasn’t going to leave with nothing.” He would be “in his [Adams’s] office, up his butt if the mayor did not do as he was told.”14 This is the tone of the discourse in the orbit of Trump.
Sassoon asked for a meeting with Attorney General Bondi, failing which she would resign. Bondi kicked the can down the road to Bove, who wrote a letter to Bondi saying in essence that she should have shut her mouth and done what she had been told. Otherwise, her resignation was accepted and she will be investigated.15
Sassoon’s resignation was followed by at least five other resignations from the justice department. Her “moment to decide” cascaded to their moments to decide. This recalls the Saturday night massacre of October 20, 1973, during the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. In that incident, one person was fired and two people resigned. All these individuals were high profile. The firing and resignations were met with public outrage. Today, few people seem to care. This is an indication of the decline of the expectation of good behavior in the United States.
Only a judge can grant the Justice Department’s demand that the Adams case be terminated without prejudice. At this writing, Judge Daniel Ho has held a hearing and has appointed a attorney, Paul Clement, who according to press coverage, will “present arguments challenging the justice department’s decision to drop the case against Adams.”16
According to one attorney in private practice, "Both from a moral perspective and a practical perspective, she [Sassoon] had no choice. The office would have been in shambles” if she had agreed to drop the case.17 But of course she did have a choice. Like so many others in a position of responsibility, she could have gone along with the thugs. Her star in the administration would have shone brightly. Sassoon is Jewish, but an observation from the New Testament is appropriate. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”18
Sassoon’s decision was admirable but costly. Why did she take the road less traveled? She is a registered Republican. One assumes she voted for Trump last November. By then, every sentient being knew who he was. Everyone knew and knows today that he has no respect for the rule of law. His ideal lawyer is the unspeakable Roy Cohn.19 Trump illustrates his contempt for the law almost daily. On February 15 he tweeted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”20 On February 19, he tweeted, referring to himself, “LONG LIVE THE KING.”21 These tweets came after Sassoon’s resignation, but they can hardly be surprising because they are in character. Shocking perhaps, but not surprising.
Did Sassoon believe she could serve in Trump’s administration and keep her skirts clean, so to speak? Bondi went along. Bove went along. They know which side their bread is buttered on. People like them need never dine alone. Sassoon is made of sterner stuff. Will she be speaking publicly about the forces at play which enabled her to do the right thing?
All Presidents lie, and there are liars in all administrations. What sets Trump apart is not so much the lies as the absence of truth. There is no room for truth in his presence.
This was obvious from the get go. Trump insisted that the crowd at his first inauguration in 2017 was the largest ever. That was an obvious lie. But in the upside-down world of Trump, one has to be willing to subscribe to his lies or else. The protagonist in Orwell’s 1984 defined freedom as the “freedom to say that two and two make four.”22 That freedom does not exist in the era of Trump. Rather, as Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon, one has to be willing “to spit on oneself in public.”23 Bondi, Bove, Homan, Adams, and the Republicans in Congress are more than willing to do so.
Sassoon is not. She is the brave woman who chose while the cowards stood aside. We await with great interest to find out why.
https://hymnary.org/text/once_to_every_man_and_nation; https://poets.org/poem/present-crisis; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Present_Crisis
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-letter-to-bondi.html
Luc Cohen, “New York Mayor Adams faces criminal indictment, vows to fight charges,” Reuters, September 26, 2024.
Maggie Haberman and Alyce McFadden, “New York Mayor Says Trump Should Not Be Called ‘Fascist,’ Breaking with Harris and Party,” New York Times, October 26, 2024.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons, “Trump Defends Adams, Arguing Both Are Being ‘Persecuted,’” New York Times, October 18, 2024.
Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich, “An Ambitious Prosecutor Quits Rather Than Do Trump’s Bidding,” New York Times, February 12, 2025; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danielle_Sassoon
Statement from President Joe Biden on additional clemency actions,” The White House, January 17, 2025; (I think he meant “any other President.”)
Danielle Sassoon, “Biden’s commutations hurt crime victims,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2025.
Sassoon, “Commutations.”
Danielle Sassoon, “Tribute: A Mentor and a Mench – Remembering Justice Scalia,” SCOTUSblog, February 23, 2016.
William K. Rashbaum, et al., “Top Justice Department Officials Meet Prosecutors in Adams’s Case,” New York Times, January 31, 2025.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/10/nyregion/adams-case-dismiss-memo.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/us/doc-annotation-letter-to-bondi.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy6gmUL-_9I
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/nyregion/memo-from-bove-1.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/eric-adams-charges-ruling/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz4lm4q1mo
Matthew 16:26
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/politics/trump-saves-country-quote.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-king-image.html
This is a powerful and devastating story. Watching Trump attempt to contravene the justice system in this manner is truly frightening. Danielle Sassoon is a hero, as are the lawyers who resigned along with her. Thank you for your compelling relation of this story.