Three federal prosecutors who worked on New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s criminal case resigned from their positions on Tuesday, claiming the Justice Department was pressuring them to “admit some wrongdoing” for refusing to dismiss the case.
The attorneys, Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom, said they had been placed on administrative leave after refusing to make the motion to dismiss the bribery case against Adams.
In a letter, addressed to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the prosecutors rejected what they claim was Blanche’s “clear” message that they would have to “express regret and admit some wrongdoing” in order to return to the Southern District of New York.
“It is now clear that one of the preconditions you have placed on our returning to the Office is that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the Office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case,” they wrote.
“We will not confess wrongdoing where there was none,” Cohen, Rohrbach and Wikstrom wrote.
The Independent has reached out to U.S. Attorney’s Office and the DoJ for comment.
The prosecutors, who said they’ve served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, defended their actions in refusing to motion to dismiss Adams’s case and criticized Blanche’s office for prioritizing “obedience” to the Trump administration over “legal and ethical obligations.”
In their one-page letter, they stressed the importance of the DoJ allowing career prosecutors to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States to instill public trust.
“Now, 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 wrote.
The recent resignations add three more to the group of at least 10 federal prosecutors who have resigned in the wake of the administration’s decision to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams.
Soon after President Donald Trump took office, his DoJ moved to have federal prosecutors in New York dismiss the case against Adams, who supported Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Prosecutors in the DoJ claimed the case was wrongly pursued and the criminal indictment prevented the mayor from carrying out his duties – including assisting the president’s agenda.
But multiple attorneys in SDNY, including the Trump-appointed acting head of the federal court, Danielle Sassoon, refused to do so and resigned.
In Sassoon’s resignation, she alleged the DoJ and Adams’s lawyers engaged in “what amounted to a quid pro quo” to have the charges dropped. Both the DoJ and Adams have denied the allegation.
Another former SDNY attorney who resigned, Hagan Scotten, said he would not comply with the DoJ’s attempts to force prosecutors to dismiss the case, claiming it would take someone “who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward” to file the motion.
Despite the massive pushback from attorneys, a New York judge ultimately dismissed the case against Adams. However, the judge rejected many of the DoJ’s arguments and said he agreed to drop the charges to protect Adams from the government using the possibility of the charges as “leverage.”
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