Lawyer Paul Clement (a former U.S. solicitor general with an impeccable legal, Republican and conservative pedigree) has exploded the corrupt garbage pushed by Trump Justice Department boss Emil Bove to temporarily suspend the criminal charges against Mayor Adams in exchange for the mayor’s political assistance.
Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho, who brought in Clement to evaluate the Bove motion, has no place to go but to follow Clement’s recommendation that the Adams case should be dropped permanently.
It’s a lucky break for Adams and a stain on the integrity of the Department of Justice’s leadership, which is much more important than a single case against a single defendant.
Yet Bove, the creator of this dishonest plot, which has roiled the ranks of DOJ professionals in Manhattan and Washington, causing numerous career prosecutors to resign, is continuing to push his goal to only temporarily set aside the Adams case while the mayor aids in President Trump’s immigration enforcement and deportations.
In a filing to Ho submitted Friday night after Clement’s scholarly analysis that the Adams prosecution should end and not be resumed, Bove, joined by Todd Blanche, top Trump DOJ appointees who also served as his personal criminal defense counsel in the Manhattan Stormy Daniels hush money trial, attack former Trump-appointed Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and her colleagues who quit rather than play along in the dirty deal.
Using bits of text messages from lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten, a stellar lawyer who, like Clement and Sassoon, clerked for storied conservatives at the U.S. Supreme Court, and like Sassoon, resigned in disgust, Bove and Blanche try to paint the image of cabal at the Southern District, the premier federal law enforcement office in the nation.
It’s all phony. Any cabal is composed of Bove, Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who tried to twist the criminal prosecution of Adams, which began before Adams was mayor and before he criticized the Biden administration’s migrant policies, into a political tool for their own purposes. In their campaign against “weaponization,” they wanted to fashion their own weapon, which Clement likened to “the proverbial Sword of Damocles over the accused” (Adams).
Clement makes the sound argument that if the government doesn’t want to prosecute, the prosecution should end. Don’t put the case on hold while Adams does the White House’s bidding.
That is part of what Sassoon and Scotten and others objected to: the corrupt reason for the suspension (and the possible renewal).
If the case was weak (which Sassoon and Scotten said it wasn’t) then drop it. Clement’s reasoning is to either prosecute the case or don’t. No halfway measure, but Bove still wants to keep his hooks in the fish in case Washington chooses to resume the matter later on (and to make sure that Adams follows their directives).
So Clement is now aligned with Adams’ lawyers who want the case dropped permanently, while Bove wants to leave open the possibility to continue the prosecution.
Bove also says in court papers that the prosecutors formerly on the Adams case, who have either quit or been suspended, are under investigation. It seems to us that Bove is the one who should be under investigation for concocting this whole mess.
