Why Emil Bove’s Battle Against Danielle Sassoon Is So Self-Defeating

It was easy to predict that a diktat from Donald Trump’s Justice Department would, at some point in his second term, prompt resignations from career prosecutors with conservative legal bona fides. Given Trump’s crude transactionalism and his administration’s determination to reshape the boundaries of executive power, it was always likely that we’d get some version of the conflict now pitting Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, against Danielle Sassoon and the other prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

It is extremely surprising, however, that the conflict would be sought and stoked just weeks into Trump’s four-year term, and for the sake of protecting Eric Adams, a Democratic mayor of a liberal city with just 11 months left in his term of office.

The Trump Department of Justice is picking a fight with its own lawyers, not for some longstanding desire of the president’s heart nor over some important point of constitutional interpretation, but to keep an official of the rival party, with no obvious political future, in office for a very short amount of time. And to the extent that there appears to be any quid pro quo at work, as the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman points out, all the Trump administration is getting from Adams is a promise to enforce existing immigration law — which given his myriad difficulties and limited tenure, is probably not worth very much.

The assumption inside the Trump administration, one supposes, is that it’s better to cull the potentially disloyal lawyers early, or to get them to prove their allegiance upfront, so that you won’t have to worry about dramatic resignations when you come to some much more important battle. Adams isn’t important in his own right; he’s just a useful test of obedience and discipline.

The difficulty with that approach is that long before administrations get to some immense high-stakes clash, it’s likely to have many, many smaller legal battles that it needs to have lawyered effectively. The Trump administration has picked a lot of those battles already, and quite a few of them — over the scope of the president’s control over the bureaucracy, especially — are fights it should be able to win. But only with good arguments and effective counsel, not with a cavalcade of hacks filing its briefs.

Thus the downside of enforcing absolute loyalty early, in a largely pointless battle, is that it signals to competent lawyers both inside and outside the administration that to work for Trump requires immediate subservience, not just cautious, careful service. And that signal tells the talented and principled, exactly the kind of lawyers Trump needs to win Supreme Court cases, that they’re better off sitting this administration out.

I’m in Munich for a big annual meeting of military officials and industry insiders, and I’m hearing two reactions to President Trump’s announcement that he is negotiating an end to the Ukraine-Russia war, over the heads of Ukrainians and NATO allies.

The first is blind fury. “Trump just lost the war,” a former military official from an Eastern European country told me, one of several who spoke to me on condition of anonymity out of fear of attracting the attention of the U.S. administration, at a meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, which begins Friday. Why would a man who had built his reputation on “the art of the deal” give in to virtually all of Vladimir Putin’s demands before even sitting down at the table?

That has mystified many Europeans who traveled to Munich hoping that the American president had a better idea about how to bring an end to the bloody conflict. The city hosting the conference has a dark history, with the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain, France and Italy allowed Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia. On Thursday a managing partner of a venture capital fund for tech start-ups that defend democracies told the assembled audience that she was in mourning: “I dressed in all black for a reason.”

But I also heard something else: appreciation that Americans were finally being honest about their limitations. Ana Miguel dos Santos, a former member of the European Parliament from Portugal who participated in a NATO-Ukraine working group, told me that she welcomed Trump’s stark statements because they will force Europe to finally wake up and figure out how to protect itself.

“I’m very tired of poetic speeches,” she said, noting that Portugal — like the rest of Europe — was ill prepared for war. “We don’t have troops.”

“I am kind of relieved,” a Polish member of a tech fund told me. Now we know that it’s our job to defend ourselves, he said, “rather than living in a fantasy that we might be defended by somebody else.”

The meeting I attended, which was put together by the U.S. military’s Defense Innovation Unit and Resilience Media, a publication for military tech professionals, was meant to inject a sense of urgency into a defense industry that moves far too slowly. Both Europe and the United States have a lot of work to do — hopefully together — to defend against looming threats.

Even without Trump, a “new trans-Atlantic deal was necessary anyway,” Mircea Geoana, a former Romanian official who recently served as deputy secretary general of NATO, told the assembled audience. The United States can’t fight wars to protect its allies in three theaters — Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. It needs NATO allies to step up.

So yes, it is shocking that Trump seems willing to send the bravest and most battle-tested army in Europe back into the arms of an authoritarian state. But it is also shocking that war has been at Europe’s door for three years — or a decade, depending on how you count — and so many European leaders are still walking around in a daydream. If Russia is the dire threat that European leaders say they know it is, they need to start acting like it.

Mayor Eric Adams paid a few genuflective visits to Palm Beach and Washington this winter. It’s no surprise that the first president convicted on felony charges and the first New York mayor indicted on felony charges would hit it off.

On Monday, President Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop federal bribery charges against his honor. The judge overseeing the case will have to review the dismissal and, since the department said its decision was largely based on the April trial date’s proximity to the June mayoral primary, the dismissal could be re-evaluated after the November election.

But it seems that to two ethically handicapped, transactional men, what was once a source of shame is merely an inconvenience to be skirted. What once was determined by a jury’s deliberation is seemingly being resolved by back-scratching.

With polls showing that only about 10 percent of New Yorkers would vote for Adams in the primary, it’s likely that his major concern was not re-election but his future freedom.

For New Yorkers, the concern is if there’s a quid for the quo. Will Adams’s decisions be based on their interests or his? (And by holding out the possibility of his Justice Department renewing the prosecution, Trump has more to hold over Adams’s head.)

No matter how Adams responds to Trump’s immigration crackdown, for instance, it should be based on his best judgment, not his worst instincts. (The Justice Department memorandum released Monday evening noted that “Mayor Adams criticized the prior administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed.”)

Adams’s decision to avoid criticizing Trump, his request that his staff do the same and the memo from city lawyers seeming to permit some warrantless searches by federal immigration agents, may be the sort of anticipatory obedience that some officials and institutions hope will stave off Trump’s wrath. Adams reportedly told city officials that criticism could jeopardize federal funds for the city.

But hovering over all of this, over all his decisions as mayor, will be the question of when is he acting as an elected official, and when is he acting as a prospective criminal defendant looking for a way out.

Letting a mayor avoid trial on charges of contaminating his office may be small potatoes compared with pardoning people who engaged in an insurrection that left police officers dead. Besides, city officials and Manhattan prosecutors are still investigating the Adams administration, and charges beyond the reach of the president are not out of the question.

Indeed, the most pertinent reaction to this outcome may not be outrage, but disgust. How did this city elect this guy?

As President Trump suspends a large share of foreign aid, the winner of my annual win-a-trip contest is reflecting on her reporting with me in Africa. The winner, Trisha Mukherjee, has written guest columns about menstruation as an impediment to education and about breastfeeding to save babies’ lives.

As I’ve written, the gutting of U.S.A.I.D. and the uncertainty around foreign aid seems to me a terrible mistake, deriving from a misperception that aid does no good. So I asked Trisha to recount the malnutrition we saw as well as the solutions that ease it. Here’s what Trisha wrote:

In a one-room clinic in rural Madagascar, a wide-eyed baby boy named Mercia watched as his mother tore open a packet of something that looked like peanut butter. Mercia devoured the paste, leaving traces all over his cheeks.

Malnutrition isn’t always something we think much about, but every year it’s a factor in the deaths of two million children under 5 worldwide. One-fifth of all children in that age group are stunted from malnutrition. But these packets — which public health workers call “small quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements” — prevent that malnutrition, for just $36 for a year’s supply. Mercia’s yummy morning treat could save his life.

While reporting with Nick, I saw wrenching scenes of children starving, of families with nothing to eat, of kids reduced to surviving off wild plants because drought had caused crops to fail. But I also found that preventing stunting and starvation is not just possible but logistically feasible and cost-effective.

“It may be the single most powerful investment you’ve never really heard of,” said Shawn Baker, chief program officer of Helen Keller Intl, which works to end global malnutrition.

In Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, Tantely Raharinirina hauled two hefty buckets of a nutritious porridge between tin lean-tos and over open sewers. Mothers and children emerged to buy a serving — fortified with essential nutrients — for the equivalent of 10 cents. Nutri’zaza, the social enterprise that provides the porridge, shows that lifesaving food doesn’t have to be expensive.

In a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, I saw another solution, this one for children already suffering from severe malnutrition. A father-daughter team, Dhiren and Nikita Chandaria, produce therapeutic foods to stabilize even dangerously ill children — and the course of treatment costs about $50. Malnutrition, I saw on this trip, is a vast and under-addressed problem — but also one that we can solve if we commit to it.

Where to begin with President Trump’s proposal to move Palestinians out of Gaza and for the United States to take it over and redevelop it?

It would be a blatant violation of international law. The forced transfer of populations is barred by the Geneva Conventions and was termed a war crime by the Nuremberg Tribunal that the United States established after World War II to try war criminals.

On Wednesday, administration officials attempted to walk back parts of what Trump said, but the truth is Trump’s proposal on Tuesday night would amount to ethnic cleansing of more than two million Palestinians in Gaza.

In any case, even if Trump could move all Palestinians out of Gaza, it would not become an American territory. The U.S. or Israel couldn’t legally absorb Gaza any more than Russia could legally seize parts of Ukraine.

Still, it won’t happen. It’s another of the bizarre assertions by Trump that are utterly impractical and simply damage America’s reputation worldwide. Does he imagine dispatching troops to force Gaza’s civilians at gunpoint into the Sinai Desert? And if he balks at spending $40 billion to fund the United States Agency for International Development annually for its lifesaving work around the world, where does he intend to find the many hundreds of billions of dollars needed to accommodate two million people?

Egypt and Jordan, which Trump may think are the obvious candidates to take people from Gaza, would be loath to accept them, and the Arab world is understandably outraged at the idea of such a forced transfer and certainly wouldn’t pay for it. The Palestinian turmoil today is seen in the Arab world through the prism of 1948, when some 800,000 Arabs were expelled or fled as Israel was established. There is deep suspicion that another mass displacement is in the works to drive Palestinians from their land in the West Bank, Gaza or both.

Trump is right, of course, that conditions in Gaza are hellish. The enclave now has more child amputees per capita than any place in the world, the United Nations says. If Trump offered to house them in Mar-a-Lago for a year on a voluntary basis, that would be a nice gesture, since many of them presumably lost their limbs to American weapons. To force them to flee their homeland would not be charity but a crime against humanity.

Partly because this massive displacement won’t happen, it’s a distraction from the need to implement the cease-fire in Gaza and continue the release of both Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. The far bigger risk is that there won’t be a smooth transition to the next phases of the agreement and the Gaza war will resume in some form.

So what Trump needs to do is spend less time conjuring grandiose visions of ethnic cleansing and more time twisting arms to keep the Gaza cease-fire on track and prevent an explosion in the West Bank.