Walter Olson
Walter Olson
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is unique among federal agencies in the extent to which its core mission is to safeguard the integrity of the law, and virtually the definition of a crisis event there is a mass resignation or firing of senior officials occasioned by their belief that they are being ordered to act in disregard of what the law requires.
Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” which caused public opinion to turn sharply against him in the Watergate affair, fell into this category. In January 2021, it was the threat of mass resignations by senior staff that stayed Donald Trump’s hand from installing an acting attorney general who would declare, in line with Trump’s wishes but against the findings of the department’s professionals, that the results of the election were suspect.
In Trump’s second administration, it has taken only three-and-a-half weeks to bring the DOJ to a mass resignation event. Yesterday, as the New York Times reported, Danielle R. Sassoon, interim US attorney for Manhattan, “quit after the Justice Department told her to withdraw corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams.… Ms. Sassoon, 38, joined the Southern District in 2016. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.” Earlier, Sassoon had clerked for noted conservative judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit.
It was a high-visibility resignation. Handling a large volume of complex cases and high-level white-collar crime investigations, the Southern District of New York is regarded as a premier US attorney’s office. Sassoon, who had been named interim chief by the incoming administration itself, most recently co-led the district’s appeals unit and is perhaps best known for successfully prosecuting crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/officials-resign-en-masse-justice-department-after-political-intervention-adams-case