“The Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our
legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong,” they said in a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The Justice Department placed Assistant U.S. Attorneys Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom, along with former acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, on administrative leave in February.

Sassoon, who replaced U.S. Attorney Damien Williams in the Southern District of New York, declined to drop the case against Adams and resigned.

MANHATTAN US ATTORNEY AND DOJ OFFICIALS RESIGN AFTER ORDER TO DROP ADAMS CHARGES

Sassoon said she was “confident” Adams was guilty and accused the government of dropping his charges in exchange for cooperating with the Trump administration’s immigration priorities. The mayor’s case would eventually be dropped with prejudice, preventing the government from holding the prospect of another prosecution over his head if he didn’t follow their directives.

“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Judge Dale Ho wrote in his decision to drop the case at the request of the DOJ.

The three prosecutors cited not wanting to abandon their principles as a reason for following Sassoon in resigning. “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,” they wrote.

Their government’s alleged directive for the prosecutors to admit wrongdoing goes against what top Justice Department official and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove wrote to Sassoon in February. He said the decision to drop the case against Adams “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case.”

All three prosecutors were placed on leave after they resisted dropping the case. Prosecutors from the Washington, D.C., Justice Department office would later file papers asking to drop the charges against Adams.

‘ENOUGH OF THIS’: ALITO’S DISSENT HIGHLIGHTS CONCERN OVER SCOTUS SHORTCUTS

Cohen was deputy chief of the office’s White Plains division and worked in the public corruption unit, handling cases of gang activity. Rohrbach worked on cases against Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

Wikstrom prosecuted a corrupt FBI official in New York and the leaders of the We Build The Wall charity, which included Steve Bannon, and was accused of defrauding donors.