Prosecutor Quits Trump’s DOJ in Brutal Letter: Find Someone Else ‘Enough of a Coward to File Your Motion’

Hagan Scotten, the Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned on Friday in a scathing letter addressed to Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove. Scotten’s resignation comes a day after his boss, U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, resigned and accused the Trump administration of entering into a “quid pro quo” with NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) to drop his corruption charges in exchange for loyalty.

“I have received correspondence indicating that I refused your order to move to dismiss the indictment against Eric Adams without prejudice, subject to certain conditions, including the express possibility of reinstatement of the indictment. That is not exactly correct,” began Scotten, adding:

The U.S. Attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, never asked me to file such a motion, and I therefore never had an opportunity to refuse. But I am entirely in agreement with her decision not to do so, for the reasons stated in her February 12, 2025 letter to the Attorney General.

In short, the first justification for the motion that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys is so weak as to be transparently pretextual. The second justification is worse. No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

Sassoon, a lifelong Republican and clerk for the late Justice [Antonin] Scalia, was widely praised for her resignation this week and refusal to carry out what she warned was a nakedly politically motivated move at the DOJ.

“There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views,” Scotten continued, adding:

I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.

Please consider this my resignation. It has been an honor to serve as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.

Scotten too comes from a conservative background. The New York Times noted, “Mr. Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces Officer and earned two Bronze Stars. He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Brett M. Kavanaugh before he, too, became an Supreme Court justice.”