The Thursday Afternoon Massacre

I realize we’re all overwhelmed by the firehose of insanities that President Musk and Vice President Trump are blasting us with these days, but it really is worth pausing to note that one of the forty scandals that dropped yesterday — the mass resignations over the Eric Adams prosecution — is truly, truly a big deal.

If you’ve been busy hiding under a pile of coats ignoring the news, the quick version is that Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove the Third — who finally answers the question, “what if Abe Vigoda had portrayed a henchman in a Bond film?” — apparently struck a comically corrupt deal with NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyers.

US Attorney Danielle Sassoon (left) and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove the Third (right), who is, with God as my witness, only 43 years old

According to a must-read letter from Trump’s own appointee as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, Emil Bove the Third overruled the prosecutors who were planning to introduce a superseding indictment which included additional charges of obstruction of justice and instead ordered the matter dropped entirely.

And, furthermore, as Sassoon related in her letter, Bove didn't just overrule the prosecutors who report to him; he proposed a new defense for the politician they were trying to convict, suggesting that the prosecution was interfering with the vitally important project of rounding up immigrants in New York City.

And as both sides discussed what was clearly a quid pro quo — literally, if you do this for us, we will do this for you — Bove re-enacted a fan favorite moment from Stringer Bell:

(Let this be a reminder that you should always read the footnotes.)

Sassoon has thoroughly conservative credentials — she’s a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia, a member of the Federalist Society and, once again, Trump’s own appointee to this position — but she refused to go along with this clearly corrupt bargain, and resigned her position as U.S. Attorney instead.

She was just the first. John Keller, acting head of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice, refused to drop the case either and resigned. And likewise Kevin Driscoll, acting head of the Criminal Division, also refused to drop the case and resigned as well. And so did another three of the top officials at DOJ.

In case anyone thought that Sassoon’s charges and the mass resignations of these officials were unfounded, Border Czar and Human Thumb Tom Homan appeared on Fox & Friends this morning along with an emasculated Eric Adams to make it perfectly clear that, yes, this was a corrupt deal. “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City,” Homan said. “I’ll be in his office, I’ll be up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

NYC Mayor and Walking Thomas Nast Corruption Cartoon Eric Adams (left) and Border Czar Tom Homan (right) who is, and I’m not kidding here, in his early 60s. Evil really ages people.

So to recap, we have a brazenly corrupt deal to drop the prosecution of a brazenly corrupt politician in exchange for his complicity in what will surely be a brutal assault against the mayor’s own constituents, which was so egregiously bad that a half dozen senior figures in the Department of Justice resigned rather than have anything to do with it.

The term “Thursday Afternoon Massacre” has been applied to this developing scandal, and if you’re missing the reference, it’s a riff on the Saturday Night Massacre in the Watergate scandal, when Nixon tried to force officials in his Department of Justice to fire the special prosecutor looking into his many crimes only to see the top two officials — Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus — resign rather than having anything to do with it.

That, to be clear, was a big deal. You can get a sense of it from the news coverage:

The Saturday Night Massacre was indeed a constitutional crisis and, moreover, a major accelerant in the campaign to impeach Richard Nixon.

The Thursday Afternoon Massacre might sound derivative, but it’s no less a crisis and no less a scandal. And while it’s quite possible it’ll get buried by other breaking news — there may have been another plane crash while I was writing this — it shouldn’t be something we shrug off as business as usual.

Trump and his just comically corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi have shown that they intend to use the Department of Justice for decidedly unjust ends, enforcing loyalty to the president over the Constitution and weaponizing federal prosecutions to frighten critics and force collaboration from vulnerable crooks like Mayor Adams.

We’re not even a month into the administration and we’ve already got a scandal that would’ve ended any other presidency. With Democrats in the minority in both houses, there’s not much they can do in terms of bringing successful impeachments against any of these officials.

But Senate Democrats can and should use the leverage they have in the remaining confirmation hearings to demand some kind of accountability here. And House Democrats can and should use the leverage of the upcoming budget negotiations and debt ceiling fight to demand the officials involved here face some consequences and/or be forced from office. And, most obviously, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul should use the power she has to remove the corrupt mayor from office immediately, both to prevent New Yorkers from being thrown under the ICE detention bus to save Adams’ skin and to raise attention to just how corrupt the Department of Justice has become.

A half dozen DOJ officials were brave enough to resign their jobs rather than be complicit in this.

We need Democratic officials to be brave enough to do their jobs now as well.