Hagan Scotten, Adams’s Lead Prosecutor, Quits Defiantly

Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, resigned after Justice Department officials ordered the dismissal of charges he had helped bring, suggesting that only a “fool” or a “coward” would obey.

In an undated, scathing resignation letter, Mr. Scotten wrote that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.”

He added: “If no 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.”

Mr. Scotten was responding to a Justice Department official’s directive this week to dismiss the bribery, fraud and other charges against Mr. Adams so the mayor could help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The official, Emil Bove III, who is the acting deputy attorney general, gave the order to Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. She resigned on Thursday rather than carry out the order to seek dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

Ms. Sassoon, 38, a veteran Southern District prosecutor, was elevated last month by the Trump administration to lead the office. At the time, she and Mr. Scotten were co-chiefs of the office’s criminal appeals unit.

A Southern District spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Scotten’s resignation.

Mr. Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and earned two Bronze Stars. He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Brett M. Kavanaugh before he, too, became an Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Scotten has led the investigation into Mr. Adams since it began in the summer of 2021. It resulted in an indictment that was announced in September by a previous U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In a hearing in October, Mr. Scotten said in court that additional charges could be brought and additional defendants charged.

Ms. Sassoon, in a letter on Thursday, noted that the Southern District was prepared to seek a new indictment that would add an obstruction count based on evidence the mayor destroyed and told others to destroy evidence and to lie to the F.B.I. She said such an indictment would also include new campaign finance accusations.

A lawyer for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, responded to the threat of new accusations, saying that if federal prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

In his four-paragraph letter, Mr. Scotten expressed disdain for Mr. Bove’s rationale for dismissing the case.

“The first justification for the motion — that Mr. Williams’s oversight in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys — is so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”

The second justification, he wrote, was worse: “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”