Former Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon was given just 40 minutes to brief Department of Justice officials on the years-long corruption probe of Mayor Adams according to a newly unsealed draft letter that also revealed Deputy AG Todd Blanche may have been involved in sensitive conversations about dropping the case prior to his confirmation.
Sassoon, who resigned rather than follow the order to seek dismissal over concerns over concerns of an improper deal between Adams and the Trump administration, drafted the letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in a last-minute effort to convince her to stop the DOJ from dropping the case.
“I remain baffled by the urgent and superficial process by which this decision was reached,” Sassoon wrote.
It’s unclear if the letter was ever sent to Bondi. The draft, along with other materials Adams’ lawyers and Trump Justice Department officials say prove Adams was unjustly prosecuted, was unsealed on Tuesday after the judge in the case ordered it.
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Sassoon also raised the possibly that Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for deputy attorney general, had been involved in sensitive conversations prior to his confimation, a potential ethics issue, She wrote that she first learned from Bove that the department was “leaning toward” trying to drop the case a week after Trump took office on Jan. 27. The prosecutor wrote that she was concerned with how quickly Bove ordered the dismissal and told him she wanted to wait for Todd Blanche’s confirmation as deputy attorney general.
“No need to wait,” Bove said, as Blanche was “on the same page.”
During his Senate confirmation hearing for his role in February, Blanche testified that he didn’t know any more about the case than the general public: “I have the same information you have,” he said.
“Todd Blanche was not involved in the Department’s decision-making prior to his confirmation,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement.
At the end of the meeting, according to Sassoon’s draft letter, then-acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed a member of her team to shred their notes, she said.
That allegation was denied by Bove.
“The former Acting United States Attorney made a series of inaccurate claims in a submission to the Attorney General of the United States, and her misrepresentations in that letter are partly why we find ourselves where we do with respect to the Adams prosecution,” Bove said in a statement. “There were many people present in that meeting, and at no time did the [Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General] direct the shredding of any material.”
The case against Adams, filed in September 2024, accused Adams accepting luxury benefits, including first-class flights and opulent hotel stays worldwide from wealthy foreign businessmen and officials in or close to the authoritarian-leaning Turkish government looking to gain influence over him. He has pleaded not guilty.
Sassoon had previously revealed that at the Jan. 31 meeting, the mayor’s attorneys “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. The deal has come under widespread criticism over its provisions that Adams help the Trump White House carry out its hardline immigration efforts.
Trump DOJ officials have claimed that Adams’ case should be dropped in part because he was politically targeted, claiming that former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams rushed into indicting Adams to further his own political career.
Sassoon admitted that Williams, her predecessor in the role, took “self-serving actions” such as creating a personal website — but she said that dismissing the case because of those actions was extreme.
“There are myriad ways to address any arising prejudice or perception of weaponization well short of a dismissal-steps routinely taken in other cases with pretrial publicity—but I have never had a chance to raise them,” Sassoon wrote.
DOJ lawyers had previously cited portions of texts between Southern District prosecutors in the case, claiming that those communications were proof the indictment was politically motivated.
The documents drop includes texts between prosecutors in the case debating on how to word the indictment.
“All good here other than my kids gave me a stomach bug for the weekend,” Hagan Scotten, a prosecutor in the case who also resigned over the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, wrote to an SDNY investigator in a friendly November text exchange where the investigator asks if he was considering becoming a judge.
“Got to convict Adams before I think about anything else. Hope all is well between you and yours,” Scotten continued.
Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho ordered the full exchanges be released last week.
“As I’ve said from the beginning, this bogus case that needed ‘gymnastics’ to find a crime – was based on ‘political motive’ and ‘ambition’ not facts or law,” Spiro said in a statement. “The more we learn about what was really going on behind the scenes, the clearer it is that Mayor Adams should have never been prosecuted in the first place.”
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