Richard Nixon had his “Saturday Night Massacre,” and now Donald Trump has his Valentine’s Day massacre.
Like any good Valentine’s story, this one is taking more than just the one day to play out. It started on Monday, when Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general and former Trump lawyer, ordered the top federal prosecutor in New York, Danielle Sassoon, to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams.
Trump wants Adams to help deport more migrants — putting political pressure on other mayors to do the same — and Adams, presumably, did not want to risk going to prison himself.
Sassoon did not go to court to pull the prosecution. Instead, she resigned on Thursday, revealing that top Justice Department officials met with Adams’ defense lawyers to map out what she said amounted to a quid pro quo. Several of her deputies also quit.
Adams and his lawyers have denied a quid pro quo, but the Trump administration has done little to dissuade the public from reaching a similar conclusion. In an unfortunate turn of phrase, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan touted the deal in a joint Fox News interview with Adams Friday. “If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said, “I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
The episode is reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre. In October 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox — the man investigating Nixon. Richardson resigned instead. So did Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork executed on Nixon’s order.
That act of fealty to president and party no doubt contributed to Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan more than a decade later — and to the Senate’s refusal to confirm Bork.
Public outrage over the Saturday Night Massacre led to a reform law and to decades of efforts by Nixon’s successors to either distance themselves from prosecutorial decisions or give the appearance of distance.
Trump chafed at the norm during his first term, when he soured on — and eventually fired — Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate any Trump ties to Russia.
But in the current case, unlike the Watergate and Russia probes, the president is not a target of investigation or prosecution. There’s no law preventing the president from directing prosecutions from the White House. Even if there were, the Supreme Court made clear last year that the president can’t be prosecuted for official actions anyway.
Adams does not enjoy such immunity, and it will be interesting to see whether state charges are brought against him in New York.
But what’s more interesting is what the episode reveals about Trump, his long-standing complaints about the politicization of the Justice Department, and his oft-repeated promise to clean up corruption in the federal government. He does not apply the same standards to himself, and there’s no indication that he intends to.
➡️ Read more: The DOJ on Friday moved to dismiss corruption charges against Adams, the latest move in a legal saga that has led to the resignations of at least seven federal prosecutors and plunged the department into crisis, Tom Winter, Ryan J. Reilly and Rich Schapiro report.
