Yes, Virginia, there are men and women of integrity who defend the rule of law. Yesterday, it was Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern district of New York. She resigned rather than drop the case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Her devotion to the rule of law was greater than her allegiance to Trump, who appointed her only a month ago. Her resignation was followed by several resignations in the Public Integrity Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The New York Daily News today reported another principled resignation by a federal prosecutor.

One of the lead prosecutors handling the sweeping public corruption case against Mayor Adams resigned on Friday — in a searing letter to President Trump’s Department of Justice saying he wouldn’t be the “fool” who files a motion to dismiss the case based on support for the administration’s immigration objectives and not the law.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and decorated U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, in his resignation letter to Trump’s acting No. 2 at the DOJ Emil Bove, said he was “entirely in agreement” with the former acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday.

Sassoon said she could not sign off on the request to drop the charges against Adams that stemmed from what’s effectively a “quid pro quo” between the mayor and the president that included the DOJ dropping the charges in exchange for Adams getting in line with the president’s immigration policies in the nation’s largest sanctuary city.

In the letter, which was first reported by The New York Times, Scotten — who has clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — said some may view Bove’s “mistake” in light of their negative views of the Trump administration, which he said he did not share.

“I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But 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,” Scotten wrote.

“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 was never going to be me…

Scotten’s blistering resignation letter came the morning after what many have already dubbed the “Thursday night massacre” at the DOJ, echoing President Nixon’s infamous 1973 DOJ purge. 

He marks the seventh DOJ staffer to resign after Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, managing the daily functioning of the federal government’s law enforcement arm in an interim capacity, ordered the dismissal of the bombshell case against Adams set to go on trial in April.

Following the mass resignations, Reuters reported Friday that Bove had threatened to fire every member of the DOJ’s public integrity section — where the case was transferred following Sassoon’s resignation — unless someone volunteered to file the dismissal motion in Manhattan federal court, where Judge Dale Ho must approve it. According to the report, Bove gave them an hour to decide, and one ultimately stepped up.