The Face of Courage

You only need to read one thing today, and this is it. This is Hagan Scotten’s resignation letter from his position as an assistant United States attorney (AUSA) in the Southern District of New York. The jobs are highly sought after. The roughly 220 prosecutors in the office are split between its criminal and civil divisions.

Hagan Scotten was in the criminal division. His was hardly a household name before today. He was hired during Barack Obama’s administration by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Before that, he was an Army Ranger for eight years and was awarded two Bronze Stars. He was first in his class at Harvard Law School and he clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

It turns out that Scotten was one of the prosecutors assigned to the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, or to be more accurate, the soon-to-be former prosecution, since a motion to dismiss the case was filed late Friday. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove signed that motion.

Before he did, Scotten sent him a letter. He began by correcting an error; he said he’d received correspondence from Bove claiming he refused an order to file a motion to dismiss the Adams case. Scotten told Bove that “wasn’t exactly correct,” because his U.S. Attorney, Danielle Sassoon who resigned on Thursday, never asked him to do it. In other words, Sassoon had the courage to do what neither Attorney General Pam Bondi or Bove had, to take responsibility rather than ordering someone else to do her dirty work.

Scotten advised Bove that the only reason he had not refused to file a motion to dismiss was because he wasn’t ordered to do so. He said he was “entirely in agreement with her [Sassoon’s] decision.” There was no justification for dismissing the case. Any suggestion it was political was belied by the fact it had been investigated under the direction of four different U.S. Attorneys. And Scotten cut through any suggestion that the proposed dismissal isn’t about ensuring Adams cooperates with the Trump administration. The dismissal is without prejudice, meaning charges can be refiled if Adams doesn’t toe the line. Scotten wrote, “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”

Then came the part where Hagan Scotten schooled the deputy attorney general, the attorney general, the president of the United States, and the rest of the country in what it means to be a federal prosecutor:

“There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Scotten and Sassoon both understood that they could not make a deal with the devil, following orders they knew were wrong, and come out with their integrity intact. It’s a lesson the Republican Party as a whole failed to grasp when they succumbed to Trump in 2016. Because it’s not just one incident where you have to decide whether to do the the right thing as opposed to making a compromise that ensures your political survival. It’s a whole series of them. If Sassoon and Scotten hadn’t drawn the line the first time, it would have been death by a thousand cuts as it has been for others. Jeff Sessions compromised his integrity until Trump fired him. Bill Barr until he realized that stealing a presidential election was a bridge too far. And so, the fate of the Republican Party and the country.

Donald Trump had plenty of good people to choose from for key positions in the Justice Department, people like Scotten and Sassoon. But instead he has surrounded himself with yes-men and yes-women, people who tell him only what he wants to hear and do whatever he wants done. And so, as Scotten suggests in his letter, if there is no one within earshot who will speak truth to power, then anything is possible for this administration. The sooner we understand that fundamental truth, the better situated we are to understand the dire situation the country now faces.

We’re in this together,

Joyce