Wall Street Journal: DOJ Abuses Its Authority in the Adams Case
In their Feb. 19 op-ed “Precedents for the Eric Adams Case,” James Copland and Rafael Mangual detail the Justice Department’s decadeslong practice of extracting behavior-altering agreements from defendants in exchange for deferring or declining prosecution. But their examples are exclusively of private citizens or corporations. When the defendant is the mayor of New York and the agreement involves public policy, the practice raises serious constitutional questions.
There is substantial evidence that the prosecution of Eric Adams is being dropped for his cooperation with the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priorities. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s memo directing the case to be dismissed explicitly cited immigration enforcement as a reason and left open the possibility of refiling it after the upcoming mayoral election. Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned rather than carry out Mr. Bove’s order, viewed the decision as exchanging a dismissal for such cooperation. And during a joint appearance on Fox News, border czar Tom Homan said of Mr. Adams: “If he doesn’t come through . . . I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’” Mr. Adams denies any quid pro quo, but he seemingly has been commandeered by the feds’ coercive prosecution power.
The U.S. Supreme Court rightly rejected the practice of impressing state and local officials into federal regulatory schemes in Printz v. U.S. (1997). The states aren’t merely instruments of Washington. Justice Antonin Scalia explained that this system of dual sovereignty is one of the Constitution’s “structural protections of liberty” that reduces “the risk of tyranny and abuse.”
The Justice Department’s actions, at least in spirit, violate the Constitution’s anticommandeering principle. They also risk converting the department’s Public Integrity Section from a combatant against corruption to a corruptor of our constitutional system. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and Washington can pursue it as it sees fit. New York should be similarly left to pursue its own obligations.
This letter to the editor originally appeared in Wall Street Journal on February 24, 2025.
