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Breaking -- Ed Sullivan is the New Robert Bork?* [1]

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Date: 2025-02-14

Trump AG Pam Bondi has apparently found her Robert Bork after 7 strikeouts attempting to get someone to sign off on dropping corruption charges against disgraced NYC Mayor Eric Adams. From Reuters:

A U.S. federal prosecutor agreed on Friday to file a motion to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to spare other career staff from potentially being fired for refusing to do so, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department's career public integrity prosecutors in a meeting on Friday that they had an hour to decide among themselves who would file the motion, the sources said. The volunteer was Ed Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, who agreed to alleviate pressure on his colleagues in the department's public integrity section, two sources said. "This is not a capitulation-this is a coercion," one of the people briefed on the meeting later told Reuters. "That person, in my mind, is a hero." Sullivan's decision came after the attorneys in the meeting contemplated resigning en masse, rather than filing the motion to dismiss, another source briefed on the matter told Reuters. There are approximately 30 attorneys in the Public Integrity Section.

Maybe they should have gone through with resigning en masse? They’re all probably going to be fired soon enough anyway.

Thursday's resignations sparked comparisons from legal experts to the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973, when senior Justice Department officials resigned after refusing President Richard Nixon's order to fire the special counsel investigating the 1972 break-in by Republican operatives at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.

*Hopefully Ed Sullivan really is just “doing it for the team” — Robert Bork tried to claim that he was also willing to resign as Solicitor General in 1973 when Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, but that Richardson and Ruckelshaus supposedly urged him to stay on for the sake of the DOJ.

The NYT has the most extensive coverage of this scandal, but I’ll just focus on the calls for Gov Hochul to step in and at least “suspend” Adams from his duties as mayor:

Former allies of the mayor publicly worried that he was now governing in Mr. Trump’s interest, not the city’s — a concern that deepened after Mr. Adams met on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, and announced an executive order that would allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex. The sequence of events prompted more New York officials, including Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, to either call for Mr. Adams to resign or be removed. “As long as Trump wields this leverage over Adams, the city is endangered,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a post on social media. “We cannot be governed under coercion. If Adams won’t resign, he must be removed.” … Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who would become the acting mayor if Mr. Adams were to resign or be removed, said on Friday that he wished the mayor would do what is best for the city and step aside. ... Looming over this is a set of political risks for Ms. Hochul. Mr. Adams would be all but certain to make a removal hearing about white elected officials targeting the city’s second Black mayor. His standing among this key group of voters appears to be faltering, though. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a longstanding ally of the mayor’s who wields considerable influence among his political base, was adamant in the fall that the governor should not remove Mr. Adams. But in an interview on Friday, he said he thought “the Trump people have compromised him. And I think that he’s put the city where we are hostage.”

Stay tuned for updates, this scandal is just going to keep on metastasizing.

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