By Larry Neumeister
New York (AP) – Three other federal prosecutors who had been involved in the corruption file now dissected against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, resigned on Tuesday, saying that they felt in a hurry to admit reprehensible acts or regret as a condition for having been restored to their work.
“We will not confess the reprehensible acts when there was none,” wrote Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wiksrom in a letter to the Deputy Prosecutor General Todd Blanche.
The three American assistant lawyers were put on leave after a number of prosecutors in New York and Washington refused to follow the orders to end the case against Adams, a democrat.
The letter was published by several media. His authenticity was confirmed to the Associated Press by a person who received the letter.
Resignations occurred on the same day as Jay Clayton, former president of Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States, was sworn in as a new prosecutor of the New York office.
Adams was charged last year, accused of having contributed to the illegal campaign and travel benefits of a Turkish official and other people seeking to buy influence when he was previously president of the Brooklyn district.
In February, after President Donald Trump took office, the Ministry of Justice ordered that the American lawyer for the South New York district Danielle Sassoon, to drop the accusations against Adams – and not because of the merits of the case, but rather that the mayor could help the order of immigration of the Trump administration.
Sassoon has chosen to resign instead, like several other career prosecutors who have opposed the dismissal of the criminal case for political reasons. The case was finally rejected in April.
Cohen, Rohrbach and Wikstrom wrote in their resignation letter that it had become clear to them that one of the “prerequisites” that Blanche returned to work was “their regret and admitting reprehensible acts by the office as part of the refusal to move to reject the case”.
The new leaders of the Ministry of Justice, they wrote, “decided that obedience replacing everything, forcing us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of Washington’s instructions. It’s false. “
Blanche said in a statement that there was nothing illegal or as an ethics to “reject the proceedings against the words against the mayor Adams”.
“On the contrary, any suggestion by anyone, in particular the former federal prosecutors, is wrong and dishonest,” he wrote.
Emil Bove, then an interim assistant attorney general, had previously argued that ADAMS was prosecuted because he had criticized the immigration policies of former president Joe Biden.
By rejecting the case, judge Dale E. Ho noted that the file has shown that prosecutors working on the case had followed all the directives.
“There is no evidence – zero – that they had inappropriate reasons,” HO wrote in his decision.
The writer Associated Press Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this Washington report.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
