On a Saturday night in October 1973, Richard Nixon sought to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, fearing (with good reason) that Cox’s Watergate investigation would end his presidency. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to do the dirty deed and resigned. Nixon next turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. He too refused and resigned. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork did Nixon’s bidding. The Saturday night massacre, as it came to be known, stood for half a century as a cautionary tale about the illicit mixing of politics and prosecution in the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Last week, the Trump administration channeled its inner Nixon. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove instructed Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), to dismiss the indictment of New York City Mayor Eric Adams on corruption charges “without prejudice,” meaning that a new indictment could be filed at any time before the running of the statute of limitations. Sassoon, who had been in the top job at the SDNY for only a few weeks since being appointed by President Trump, declined.
In a carefully reasoned but pointed letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Sassoon noted, among other things, that: (1) Bove’s claim that the Adams indictment occurred too close to the next mayoral election was pretextual, in light of the facts, comparable cases, and longstanding DOJ policy; (2) dismissing the indictment appeared to be a corrupt quid pro quo in exchange for Adams’s willingness to provide immigration enforcement assistance to the Trump administration; and (3) Bove’s claim that the prosecution was orchestrated for political reasons by Sassoon’s predecessor, Damian Williams, was false, given that the investigation of Adams began before Williams took office and that the charges were approved by numerous DOJ officials unconnected to Williams. Sassoon asked to meet with Bondi, adding that if the latter refused, she would resign.
Bondi did not meet with Sassoon. Instead, Bove—who, until quite recently, had been Trump’s own criminal defense lawyer in the New York hush-money trial that resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts—sent Sassoon a tendentious letter accusing her of insubordination and accepting her resignation. Bove and the other top brass at DOJ then triggered a wave of resignations as each prosecutor they instructed to seek dismissal of the Adams indictment refused.
Among those prosecutors who resigned rather than appear in court asking to dismiss the indictment of Adams was SDNY Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, whose letter to Bove emphasized that such a dismissal without prejudice would be a means for the administration to improperly hold the threat of re-indictment over Adams as leverage for unrelated aims. Scotten protested that
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 never was going to be me.
Notably, Sassoon, Scotten, and the other DOJ attorneys who resigned in protest rather than participate in Trump’s perversion of justice are not deep-state woke Democrats seeking to block his policy agenda. Rather, they are principled conservatives. Sassoon was a law clerk for conservative hero Antonin Scalia. Scotten clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee who authored the sweeping immunity decision favoring Trump just last year. Scotten’s letter specifically disavowed holding any “generally negative views of the new Administration.” Like former Representative Liz Cheney, Sassoon, Scotten, and the other DOJ prosecutors who succumbed to the sequel to the Saturday night massacre rather than betray their oaths, are simply patriots who respect the rule of law.
The Unitary Executive Theory
In Bove’s reply to Sassoon, he asserted that her “oath to uphold the Constitution does not permit [her] to substitute [her] policy judgment for that of the President or senior leadership.” Implicit in that claim is a version of what is sometimes called the unitary executive theory. Article II of the Constitution vests “[t]he executive power” in “a President.” Some conservatives have long argued that, consequently, anyone who exercises the executive power on behalf of the federal government must be answerable to, and thus subject to at-will dismissal by, the president.
The conflict over the Adams prosecution is not the only site in which the Trump administration has recently invoked the unitary executive theory. Last week, Trump’s acting Solicitor General sent a letter to Illinois Democrat Richard Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stating that the administration would not defend acts of Congress that limit the ability of the president to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, or the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That development was hardly unexpected, given that Trump has already taken actions that violate statutes that limit his ability to dismiss top officials at such independent agencies.
Pending litigation and additional lawsuits that may be filed in the coming weeks and months will test whether the Trump administration’s sweeping view of presidential authority prevails. In recent years, various Supreme Court decisions have weakened the status of a key New Deal-era precedent that upheld congressional authority to insulate some federal agencies from direct political control by the president. Whether at least five of the Court’s six Republican appointees are willing to go so far as the Trump administration now urges remains to be seen.
Should the Court embrace the super-charged version of the unitary executive theory on offer, it could do serious long-term damage to the American economy. Although some federal agencies that Congress has rendered independent could function reasonably effectively under presidential direction (at least when the president is not a narcissistic ignoramus), others need independence. The clearest example is the Federal Reserve Board. A central bank under direct presidential control will set monetary policy tuned to the political cycle rather than the business cycle, risking disastrous hyper-inflation when, as Trump apparently wants, it sets interest rates lower than the economic data indicate. If the Supreme Court agrees with Trump’s version of the unitary executive theory, it will need to find some way to preserve Federal Reserve independence, lest it risk a repeat of the hyper-inflation that doomed Germany’s Weimar Republic and paved the way for Nazism.
The Intra-Conservative Argument is About Norms
Although it is inaccurate to call Donald Trump a “conservative,” his administration’s promotion of the unitary executive theory does fit comfortably within longstanding conservative ideology. For example, Justice Scalia famously dissented from the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision upholding the Independent Counsel Act on the ground that it deprived the president of the power to control federal criminal prosecution, which he deemed “the exercise of purely executive power.”
Why, then, do conservative prosecutors like Sassoon and Scotten find themselves at odds with Bove? The short answer is that they do not disagree with Bove’s assertion that U.S. Attorneys and Assistant U.S. Attorneys ultimately exercise power on behalf of and thus at the pleasure of the Attorney General and the president. Rather, they object to how the DOJ under Trump is exercising that power.
A New York Times article by Adam Liptak highlights how Bove, on the one hand, and Sassoon, on the other, each cite a famous 1940 speech by then-Attorney General Robert Jackson describing the role and awesome power of federal prosecutors. As Liptak notes, Bove’s letter cherry-picks a line from that speech in which Jackson acknowledged some need for central coordination of federal prosecutorial policy, but Sassoon’s letter accurately conveys the overall thrust of Jackson’s speech. Sassoon correctly characterized Jackson’s remarks as falling within the longstanding tradition and Justice Department policy according to which prosecutors decide whom to charge based on the facts and law, not politics.
Put differently, the conflict between Trump lackeys in the highest ranks of the DOJ and the professionals heretofore on the front lines is chiefly about norms and only secondarily about law. Unfortunately, as we have learned in the nearly ten years since Donald Trump launched his political career, norms mean nothing to him. Even more ominously, Trump increasingly regards his own will as law, regardless of how many statutes or constitutional provisions he violates.
