The resignation of seven Justice Department officials after refusing to drop charges against an ally of President Trump marks the first significant defiance of Trump by federal officials, raising the conflict between the president and his critics to a new level, the Washington Post reports. The mass resignation is drawing comparisons with the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when DOJ officials quit rather than obey President Richard Nixon’s orders to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. The current action could create a precedent for more acts of resistance if Trump orders other government officials to do things they find inappropriate or believe would violate their legal responsibilities. “It’s obviously unprecedented, as far as I know. It’s a very big deal,” said Robert Litt, a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration. Attorneys, he said, “don’t resign because you disagree with the policies, but because you are being asked to do something you believe is ethically, morally or legally improper.”
The departures may be resonant because some key figures have strong conservative credentials, bearing little resemblance to the “radical left lunatics” that Trump often depicts as his enemies. Danielle Sassoon, who resigned as acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative legend. She called the Trump administration’s move to drop charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent.” Few public officials have resigned to protest Trump’s actions until now. Adams was charged with wire fraud, bribery and seeking illegal campaign contributions. On Monday, DOJ official Emil Bove ordered prosecutors to withdraw the charges, saying they could interfere with Adams’s ability to cooperate with Trump’s immigration officials. To prosecutors, that was a brazenly improper quid pro quo — work with us on immigration and you walk free — though Bove and Adams denied any explicit request. Bove, responding to Sassoon, said that only the president and attorney general get to interpret the Constitution and make policy, not career prosecutors like Sassoon. “It is not for local federal officials such as yourself, who lack access to all relevant information, to question these judgments within the Justice Department’s chain of command,” he wrote in accepting Sassoon’s resignation.