Fox News Legal Anaylst Andy McCarthy slammed President Donald Trump and his underlings over their order to drop the case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) in a pair of columns for National Review this week.
In his first piece, McCarthy wrote, “Politicized law enforcement is always wrong. And it is not more attractive when it insulates a politician from what appears to be righteous law enforcement than when it targets a politician with what appears to be discriminatory law enforcement. That is the lesson of the Trump Justice Department’s dropping of the corruption case against New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.”
According to McCarthy, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s order to acting SDNY U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon was “explicitly political,” despite the fact that it “hilariously claimed to be part of the new DOJ’s crusade against politicized prosecutorial decision making.”
He was even more befuddled by Bove’s claim that the DOJ was “in no way call[ing] into question the integrity and efforts” of the prosecutors in the case, including Sassoon.
“This is ridiculous. Bove concedes that Main Justice has not ‘assess[ed] the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which it is based,’” observed McCarthy. “It is thus impossible for Bondi and Bove to have made a responsible evaluation of whether the case is a political vendetta, or to have concluded that Adams was ‘targeted’ as the memo asserts.”
He went on to note that Sassoon may sooner resign than follow Bove’s directive.
That forecast proved prescient. Sassoon stepped down on Thursday, writing that Adams’ sudden enthusiasm for an immigration crackdown was clearly part of an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration and escape punishment.
“Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case,” submitted Sassoon, who echoed McCarthy’s concern that dropping the charges against Adams would “amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department.”
In a follow-up column, McCarthy lambasted Bove for his handling of the fallout from her resignation.
In a letter of his own, Bove informed Sassoon that the prosecutors on the Adams case would be placed on leave and investigated by both Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ’s internal investigation team, despite the fact that his previous letter had insisted that he was “in no way call[ing] into question the integrity and efforts” of those prosecutors.
McCarthy minced no words in his evaluation of Team Trump’s motives and actions:
Given this, how is Bove suddenly in any position to conclude that an investigation he has not objectively and comprehensively assessed is “politically motivated”? How is he in a position to claim that prosecutors, whose integrity he just got through suggesting was unimpeachable, should now be subject to an internal investigation?
And how did Danielle Sassoon violate her oath? It seems to me that she’s the one honoring her oath. Unlike Bove, she’s looked hard at the case and is convinced that it’s not politically motivated, so she refused to affirm Main Justice’s uninformed, patently political conclusion that it was. Nevertheless, she didn’t choose to continue pursuing the case in defiance of Main Justice; she resigned. She didn’t insubordinately put Bondi or Bove in a position of having to dismiss her; she did the honorable thing and quit.
That this puts them in a difficult political position is not her fault, it’s their fault.
“In reality, President Trump decided it was in his interest to do a political favor for Mayor Adams. His subordinates tried to cloak this raw political gesture in legally palatable raiments,” he concluded. “But the rationale offered was incoherent. Now that it has predictably blown up, they blame the people who wouldn’t play along.”
