Don’t Surrender to the Coercion Presidency

Opinion|Don’t Surrender to the Coercion Presidency

President Trump’s determination to bend the American justice system to his will, combined with his broad tolerance for political corruption and his abhorrence of checks and balances on his power, slammed hard last week into the commitment to duty, honor and the rule of law shared by a group of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and Washington, D.C. The confrontation between Mr. Trump’s lieutenants at the Justice Department — led by his former personal defense lawyer, Emil Bove III — and Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and her colleagues is the clearest example yet of this administration’s efforts to bake quid pro quo deal making, coercive tactics, loyalty tests and other dishonorable practices into American government and warp its long-held principle of equal justice before the law.

Those tactics are being used not just in Washington, but increasingly at the state and city level, too, particularly against local policies that Mr. Trump opposes. In this case, the Justice Department has undermined the ethical and trustworthy governance of New York City by moving to let its mayor, Eric Adams, off the hook for corruption charges brought by Southern District prosecutors, in apparent exchange for Mr. Adams’s acquiescence and support for the Trump administration’s desires, starting with its crackdown on illegal immigration.

This board called on Mr. Adams to resign last September, after the indictment was unsealed; the damage and destabilization now resulting from this devil’s bargain between the mayor and the Justice Department make it only more urgent that Mr. Adams step down. If he does not, he must face an investigation and possible prosecution by state officials. New York City voters will also have an important say in the matter. In the June mayoral primary, they will have to muster the clarity and resolve to stop Mr. Adams if he continues his candidacy for re-election.

What is so alarming about the Trump Justice Department’s actions is that the nation’s top law enforcement officials are bent not just on turning an intentionally blind eye to their peers alleging illegal actions and exploiting the misconduct of a desperate lackey like Mr. Adams for their own purposes, but on corrupting the prosecutors and civil servants in the department itself. That much was clear in letters written by Ms. Sassoon and her Southern District colleague Hagan Scotten outlining the reasons they would not obey the flagrantly dishonest and untenable order to drop the Adams charges from Mr. Bove, the acting deputy attorney general who had served (and lost) as Mr. Trump’s criminal lawyer in his hush money case. The resignation letters by the two prosecutors, both with conservative backgrounds, are compelling declarations of why demands like these from the administration are serious violations of democratic practice, tradition, precedent, decency and legality.

“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Mr. Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Ms. Sassoon wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“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,” followed Mr. Scotten in his own resignation letter.