Three Manhattan federal prosecutors who worked on the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said Tuesday that they would resign rather than admit wrongdoing by their office after it refused to abandon the case, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
The prosecutors were placed on administrative leave this year after Trump administration officials in Washington ordered the head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek dismissal of the bribery and fraud charges.
In the email, the prosecutors — Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom — said that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, had placed a condition on reinstating them: “that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case.
“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they wrote.
They wrote that they had worked under Democratic and Republican presidents, advancing the priorities of all, but that conditions had changed during President Trump’s second term.
“Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington,” they wrote.
A spokesman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Three prosecutors resigned from the Southern District of New York on Tuesday rather than apologize for their work on the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
The prosecutors’ resignation coincided with the first day on the job for Jay Clayton, the newly installed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, adding to the sense of tumult in that office this year. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office also declined to comment on the resignations.
The Trump administration’s extraordinary move to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams this year caused upheaval in the Justice Department. With Tuesday’s resignations, the decision has now led to the exit of at least 11 federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington, including an interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon.
In February, Emil Bove III, a former defense lawyer for Mr. Trump who is now a top Justice Department official, directed Ms. Sassoon to abandon the case, suggesting that it was hindering Mr. Adams’s assistance with the White House’s agenda of mass deportations. At the time, he said that the decision “in no way calls into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutors responsible for the case.”
But when the U.S. attorney’s office began to resist, Mr. Bove quickly placed Hagan Scotten, the case’s lead prosecutor, and Mr. Wikstrom on administrative leave. Mr. Rohrbach and Ms. Cohen were placed on leave in March and escorted out of the building. Ultimately, prosecutors from the Justice Department in Washington filed the papers asking the judge to drop the charges.
Ms. Cohen was deputy chief of the office’s White Plains division, worked in the public corruption unit and handled mob and gang cases. Mr. Rohrbach worked on cases against Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein; the crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried; and the former head of a police union.
Mr. Wikstrom handled the prosecutions of a corrupt counterintelligence chief in New York’s F.B.I. office and the leaders of a charity charged with defrauding donors to a private effort to help construct a wall along the Mexican border.
This month, Judge Dale E. Ho of U.S. District Court in Manhattan dismissed the Adams case, which all three had worked on, though he harshly criticized the Justice Department, suggesting that it had made an inappropriate deal with the mayor.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” he wrote.
Judge Ho wrote that Mr. Adams, who had pleaded not guilty to the five counts, was still to be presumed innocent, given that a trial would never go forward. He clarified that his decision “is not about whether Mayor Adams is innocent or guilty.”
In their resignation letter Tuesday, the prosecutors wrote that it was their duty to uphold the Constitution, the laws of the United States and the rules of professional ethics.
“There is no greater privilege than to work for an institution whose mandate is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons,” they wrote.” We will not abandon this principle to keep our jobs. We resign.”
