Three Manhattan federal prosecutors who worked on the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City said Tuesday that they would resign rather than admit wrongdoing by their office after it refused to abandon the case, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
The prosecutors were placed on administrative leave this year after Trump administration officials in Washington ordered the head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to seek dismissal of the bribery and fraud charges.
In the email, the prosecutors — Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom — said that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, had placed a condition on reinstating them: “that we must express regret and admit some wrongdoing by the office in connection with the refusal to move to dismiss the case.
“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” they wrote.
They wrote that they had worked under Democratic and Republican presidents, advancing the priorities of all, but that conditions had changed during President Trump’s second term.
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“Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington,” they wrote.
A spokesman for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the Prosecutors’ Letter
Three prosecutors resigned from the Southern District of New York on Tuesday rather than apologize for their work on the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
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