From The Times profile into Sassoon as archived on Feb. 12, 2024at 3:51 pm:
Eric Adams Case Tests an Ambitious Prosecutor’s Independence
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, has built a life on conservative values. The order to drop the corruption case against New York’s mayor is her greatest challenge yet.
The article was modified to read just 24 hours later, at Feb. 13, 2025, 4:55 p.m. ET, under the same link:
An Ambitious Prosecutor Quits Rather Than Do Trump’s Bidding
Danielle R. Sassoon, Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, built a life on conservative values and amassed a daunting resume. On Thursday, she took a stand against the Justice Department where she had made her career.
Now, we look at what Sassoon & Company filed on behalf of Trump administration on February 11, 2025 in federal court:
Plaintiffs bring this unprecedented and unsupported challenge to the Executive Branch’s ability to exercise politically accountable oversight of agency activities and to implement the President’s policy priorities. Dissatisfied with those priorities, Plaintiffs seek an emergency injunction barring duly appointed Treasury Department officials, whose responsibilities include liaising with the United States DOGE Service (“USDS”), from accessing systems in the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (“BFS” or “Bureau”) necessary to perform their Presidentially-directed mandate of maximizing efficiency and productivity, including ensuring data and payment integrity with respect to the 1.2 billion transactions and over $5 trillion in outlays handled by BFS. As demonstrated below, Plaintiffs are not entitled to the injunction they seek, which would violate the separation of powers by impermissibly intruding into the Executive’s decisionmaking with respect to which Treasury Department employees are granted access to BFS systems and data, in order to provide oversight of the Department and to implement the Executive’s priorities. Further, Plaintiffs lack standing, and their claims fail on the merits. The Privacy Act, underpinning the majority of Plaintiffs’ claims, is only available to individuals, not governmental units. Nor can Plaintiffs rely on the Administrative Procedure Act to circumvent the Privacy Act’s express restrictions. For similar reasons, Plaintiffs claims under the Internal Revenue Code and the Ethics in Government Act also fail. Accordingly, Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction should be denied.
The case itself was seen as retaliatory for Adams not desiring further housing of illegal aliens inside his city. (Here is a video of the phone seizure performed on Eric Adams top advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin.)
As per usual, the indictment was a way for the prior administration to leverage a rather unpopular mayor that once was a darling of the Democrats. But if one doesn’t play ball with the Democrat political machine, the answers are severe and delivered by the BLOB State by any means and leverage points necessary.
Sassoon, if she still is a conservative, certainly does not see the long game. Her exit means that incoming Southern District AG Jay Clayton will be taking over a SDNY AG office in turmoil. Which may actually be a good thing.
He will not be inserted in time to impact the DOGE case filings in New York if this expedites to the Supreme Court. Or other ongoing proceedings that Bondi would rather have in energetic and talented hands (Sassoon was lead attorney on the SBF case – gaining great notoriety to build her sparkling resume.) Hopefully, Clayton is doing his homework on all filings for his forthcoming office. This will not be a cushy job under Trump.
Sassoon, one speculates, is merely exploiting the dropping of charges against Adams (and undoubtedly her forthcoming birth – she’s around 8 months pregnant) to leverage up her temporary titling as SDNY AG. From 3 weeks posted as SDNY AG, she can appear as a paragon of prosecutorial virtue for down-the-road opportunities. Private firm practice anyone? She can pick after a hiatus from the profession for appropriate reasons.
One sees Sassoon selfishly dumping herself off the DOGE case (an appeal happens today) right as it needs direct jealous advocacy from the Southern District for the Trump administration. While Emil Bove in DC and Pam Bondi as AG wrangle in their AGs around the country, and Trump has DOGE team cracking open potentially HUGE FRAUD cases to hand off to an ambitious prosecutor on a silver platter, Sassoon thinks she made a highly principled decision.
Instead, she’s made a fashionably quick exit from being a legal warrior to a just another operative for the administrative or BLOB state that Trump is exposing like a pus-filled boil the size of Washington, DC itself.
Danielle R. Sassoon shot like a laser through the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, with stints fighting violent crime and securities fraud as well as handling appeals before she was elevated, at age 38, to be its interim head.
There, just weeks into her tenure running the country’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office, she encountered an obstacle that has threatened to stall her rapid rise: the desire of President Trump’s administration to drop corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.
But on Thursday, Ms. Sassoon resigned rather than carry out the order, setting off several other resignations within the Department of Justice and standing up for the independence that has defined her Manhattan office for decades…
Given her experience — and bulletproof conservative credentials as a member of the Federalist Society — Ms. Sassoon seemed ready to lead an office that saw tumultuous times during Mr. Trump’s first term, when he fired two of its U.S. attorneys.
But if she was unafraid to speak frankly with her peers, Ms. Sassoon could be soft-spoken with the mentors on campus. A family friend introduced her to the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who soon brought her on as a research assistant. Mr. Dershowitz said that Ms. Sassoon understood “all sides of all arguments” but recalled her as “diffident, reserved” and “shy.”
She later clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia, a giant of the conservative legal movement. In an essay after his death in 2016, she wrote, “Justice Scalia was my kind of feminist.
“He spared me no argumentative punches and demanded rigor from my work,” she added. “He taught me how to fire a pistol and a rifle, and made me feel like I had grit. He thickened my skin, which was the best preparation for a career in a male-dominated field.”
[Note: there are more women lawyers enrolling and then graduating since 2016 than men.]
Ms. Sassoon cited her obligation to both Judge Wilkinson and Justice Scalia in her letter to the attorney general, Pam Bondi.
The New York Times propagandists do not write such glowing pieces about a conservative lawyer unless they have foolishly (or opportunistically) chosen to help out the BLOB STATE in their decisions.
Good luck in your future, Ms. Sassoon. Moving on….
Very insightful analysis, Jason. Thank you.
That was a great way to eliminate the “resistance” / the trash took itself out, nice and efficient!