Who is Danielle Sassoon, the US attorney who resigned rather than drop charges against Eric Adams?

NEW YORK (AP) — Danielle Sassoon had served just three weeks as interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York when she penned a letter to recently confirmed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi saying she could not follow a directive to drop the office’s corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Sassoon wrote in her letter obtained by The Associated Press that the directive to drop the charges issued by Bove would violate her sworn duty to uphold the law.

The directive, “raises serious concerns that render the contemplated dismissal inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts,” she wrote.

Sassoon did not return a message seeking comment. But in her letter, she alluded to some details of her 10 years of public service that shed light on how she came to the decision to resign and who the now-former federal prosecutor who made headlines for defying the new DOJ is.

What are Sassoon’s credentials?

Sassoon, 38, graduated from Harvard College in 2008 and from Yale Law School in 2011, according to her biography on the Department of Justice website, which was taken down Thursday.

Sassoon served as a foreign law clerk to Justice Hanan Melcer of the Israel Supreme Court in 2009, according to a biography attached to an essay she wrote while on a legal scholarship in London. Sassoon wrote in an editorial while at Harvard about her grandmother’s journey as a Jewish teenager fleeing persecution from Syria to Lebanon and eventually Italy in 1947.

Sassoon also clerked for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III in the Fourth Circuit in Charlottesville, Virginia, and for late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a 2016 tribute to the late justice, who was an outspoken stalwart for the court’s conservative wing, Sassoon, a Republican, called Scalia “the real deal.”

“Sometimes, when you peek behind the curtain of power, you suffer a rude awakening. What you find is corruption, ego, or a lack of ideals and intellectual heft. Stepping behind closed doors with Justice Scalia elevated my faith in the judiciary and deepened my love of the law,” she wrote in the tribute posted to the SCOTUS blog.

Sassoon also cited Scalia in her letter objecting to the directive to drop charges against Adams, a Democrat who has curried favor with President Donald Trump’s administration partly based on immigration issues.

Sassoon cited her objections to what she called a political “quid pro quo” with Adams’ legal team for the mayor to enforce Trump’s immigration policies only if he was freed from the looming prosecution. Attorneys for Adams, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, denied any offer or suggestion of a quid pro quo.

What is Sassoon’s track record at the U.S. attorney’s office?

After clerking for Scalia, Sassoon was a litigation lawyer and an adjunct law professor at New York University before being hired in 2016 as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. She focused on murder and racketeering cases as part of the Violent and Organized Crime Unit, according to the now-defunct DOJ biography.

She worked on a handful of high-profile cases including the case against Lawrence Ray, who was convicted of trafficking and other offenses after living in his daughter’s college dorm room and coercing a group of college students to engage in prostitution. Sassoon also conducted the cross-examination of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency executive convicted of defrauding customers out of billions of dollars. Both men are appealing their convictions.

The DOJ biography notes she was most recently co-chief of the Criminal Appeals division in the office. It also notes numerous awards from the department in recent years, including the FBI Director’s Award in 2024 for Outstanding Criminal Prosecution.

She was appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for the district on Jan. 21 and had not brought the initial charges against Adams. Those charges were brought by former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, a Democrat who resigned after Trump won reelection.

What happens next?

After a stunning dayslong standoff, Sassoon’s resignation was accepted in a scathing letter Thursday from acting Attorney General Emil Bove. Bove placed case prosecutors on paid administrative leave and said they and Sassoon would be subject to internal investigations.

It was unclear what agency would do that investigation and what sanctions would be at stake since Sassoon is no longer employed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Meanwhile, Matthew Podolsky, who has spent a decade in the office, was named the new acting U.S. attorney after Sassoon’s departure. Trump’s ultimate pick for the office, Jay Clayton, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, has not yet been confirmed.

As of Friday afternoon, motions to dismiss the charges against Adams had not been filed and a handful of employees from the department’s public integrity section have also left.