Trump Saved Eric Adams’s Butt More Than We Even Realized

It seems like New York Mayor Eric Adams got exactly what he wanted from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice—and then some.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, two days after acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams. Bove claimed that they hindered the mayor’s ability to target immigrants at Trump’s behest.

In a scathing eight-page letter announcing her resignation, Sassoon revealed that her office was preparing to hit Adams with a superseding indictment from a new grand jury.

“We have proposed a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI, and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme,” Sassoon wrote.

Sassoon, who has a strong conservative record and clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, warned that dismissing the case against Adams would amplify—rather than abate—concerns about weaponization in the Department of Justice.

Adams was previously hit with a 57-page indictment, including five damning public corruption charges, alleging that he’d sought out and taken bribes from the Turkish government. The indictment refers to “a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” who “facilitated many straw donations” to Adams on behalf of foreign nationals and businesses.

Sassoon’s letter revealed that Adams’s attorneys were up to a similar gambit during his negotiations with the Justice Department. During a meeting on January 31 with Bove, Adams’s lawyers, and members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, “Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Sassoon wrote, in a footnote of her letter.

“Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion,” Sassoon said, indicating that Bove didn’t wish for a record of Adams’s request to exist. It seems that Adams got exactly what he wanted from Trump’s DOJ.

In her letter, Sassoon criticized the rationale behind dismissing the charges, arguing that Bove and the DOJ had “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based.” Instead, Bove argued that dismissal was necessary on policy grounds because the “pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.”

Sassoon pointed out that “Adams has already seized on the memo to publicly assert that he is innocent and that the accusations against him were unsupported by the evidence and based only on ‘fanfare and sensational claims.’”

“Confidence in the Department would best be restored by means well short of a dismissal,” she added.

Three senior Justice Department officials resigned Thursday rather than drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. 

On Monday, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop the charges against Adams, claiming that they limited Adams’s ability to help President Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. Apparently, that did not sit well with the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, who opted to resign instead.   

After her office refused to drop the charges against Adams, the DOJ then sought to move the case over to the agency’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, D.C., which handles all federal public corruption cases. But then, the section’s acting head, John Keller, left his position rather than drop the charges. 

As a result, Adams’s case went to the DOJ’s criminal division, which oversees every federal criminal case in the country. Kevin Driscoll, the division’s acting head, didn’t want to drop the charges either, and he then resigned. 

Of all three, Sassoon’s resignation is the most surprising, considering that she has a strong conservative resume. A member of the influential Federalist Society, she once clerked for Supreme Court Justice and conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia. More recently, she captured the national spotlight for prosecuting cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The stunning sequence of events evokes memories of the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when President Nixon tried to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was tasked with investigating the infamous Watergate scandal, causing the top two officials in the DOJ to resign instead. It was only the third ranking DOJ official at the time, conservative Robert Bork, who finally agreed to carry out the firing. 

The Trump administration appears to be doing Adams a favor for cozying up to the president, ignoring the multiple counts of fraud and bribery against Adams for actions going back to 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president. It seems that some of the DOJ’s prosecutors can see the corruption coming from on high, even those with right-wing backgrounds.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum threatened Thursday to sue Google after it changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in its maps, in compliance with Donald Trump’s superficial executive order.

Google announced Tuesday that it had updated the name of the body of water on its maps system, keeping with the standards set by the federal Geographic Names Information System. In the U.S., the name would appear as the inane “Gulf of America”; in Mexico, the “Gulf of Mexico”; and everywhere else would see a monstrous “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).”

During a press conference Thursday, Sheinbaum said that her government had exchanged letters with Google about the issue but that the company had not resolved the complaints.

“Who we have a dispute with is Google,” Sheinbaum said, according to Bloomberg. “If they keep insisting, we’ll consider a lawsuit.”

Sheinbaum argued that Trump’s vanity project could remain but that it needed to be limited to a small section of the gulf, saying that “the only place it was effective was where [the U.S.] has sovereignty, or up to 22 nautical miles from the coast,” according to Reuters.

It’s worth noting that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was among those invited to flank Trump at the inauguration, cementing just how important the administration’s ties to Silicon Valley are and just how much these pitiable tech bros hope to stay in the pocket of the president.

Trump wants a former Amazon executive to lead the country’s workplace safety agency.

On Wednesday, the president nominated David Keeling to serve as head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is tasked with maintaining safe and humane working conditions for American workers. Keeling previously oversaw safety at Amazon and UPS.

Both of those companies have been cited for various workplace safety violations by the very agency Keeling is set to control, if confirmed by the Senate. In 2019, OSHA cited UPS for forcing its drivers to work in “excessive heat” with no air conditioning. That same year, UPS was also cited for fire hazards at packaging facilities. Amazon has been cited numerous times for the dangerous, high-pressure environments in its warehouses, as well as the long hours its employees are forced to spend in them. Just last year, Amazon paid a $145,000 settlement over OSHA violations.

Keeling worked as director of safety compliance for UPS from 2011 to 2018 before serving as the vice president of global health and safety from 2018 to 2021, overlapping with OSHA’s 2019 safety citations. The same can be said for Amazon, where he worked from 2021 to 2023—a time when Amazon had one of the highest warehouse injury rates in the country.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the United States, but before meeting with President Trump, he met with someone arguably more powerful: Elon Musk.

At Blair House in Washington, D.C., Thursday, Musk and Modi discussed “space, mobility, technology and innovation,” according to a post from Modi’s X account. Modi also met with three of Musk’s children.

Several parts of Musk’s businesses concern India. The tech mogul is trying to get access for his Starlink satellite internet service in the country, and is fighting with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, who has competing interests. Musk also is trying to sell low-cost Tesla vehicles in India and get past the country’s tariffs on electric vehicles.

All of this has prompted critics to question what exactly Musk’s role is in the federal government—and why he’s meeting with foreign leaders. Senator Chris Murphy pointed out some of his conflicts of interests, and the self-serving nature of his meeting.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is supposedly meant to reduce costs and streamline government for the benefit of the American people. If the tech mogul is meeting leaders like Modi in Washington, D.C., he is effectively acting like a diplomat, as Murphy noted, but in his own interests rather than those of the country. The fact that Modi is meeting with Musk before Trump suggests that the fascist Indian leader sees the fascist tech CEO as more important than the president.