Steve Vladeck has a summary of DOJ corruption under Trump:

There isn’t enough electronic ink to fully summarize the background of the Eric Adams saga. To make a very long story short, the 110th Mayor of the City of New York was indicted last year by federal prosecutors on one count of conspiracy to receive campaign contributions from foreign nationals and commit wire fraud and bribery; two counts of soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals; and one count of soliciting and accepting a bribe. In essence, the indictment claimed that Adams received more than $100,000 worth of free plane tickets and luxury hotel stays from wealthy Turkish nationals and at least one government official over the course of a decade.

Trump’s AG, Pam Bondi, and one of here deputies, Emil Bove, are attempting to stop the prosecution.  It’s a straight up quid pro quo to enlist Adams’ assistance with deportations.  Towards that end, they directed the lead prosecutors in the NY US Attorney’s office – Trump appointees themselves! – to drop it. Their direction was so egregiously unlawful that the prosecutors quit:

What’s striking about this is not just how transparent what’s actually happening is; it’s Bove’s candid admission, in today’s letter, that “the policies of a democratically elected President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General” take precedence over a Justice Department lawyer’s oath … to the Constitution. It would be one thing if Bove argued that the President’s (or Attorney General’s) interpretation of the Constitution takes precedence over that of an Interim U.S. Attorney. But that’s not even his argument. Rather, it’s that Sassoon (who, although it shouldn’t matter, is a Republican who clerked for Justice Scalia) had no business raising to the Attorney General her view of what the law required in a case in which it conflicts with the political preferences of the President—indeed, that it was “insubordinate” for her to do so.

My original post follows below the break but Vladeck’s write-up is much better.

Mr. Bove has a central role in this (emphasis mine):

President Trump had just taken office when lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams of New York went to the White House with an extraordinary request: They formally asked in a letter that the new president pardon the mayor in a federal corruption case that had yet to go to trial.

Just a week later, one of Mr. Trump’s top political appointees at the Justice Department called Mr. Adams’s lawyer, saying he wanted to talk about potentially dismissing the case.

What followed was a rapid series of exchanges between the lawyers and Mr. Trump’s administration that exploded this week into a confrontation between top Justice Department officials in Washington and New York prosecutors.

On Monday, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department sent a memo ordering prosecutors to dismiss the charges against the mayor. By Thursday, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest over what she described as a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and the mayor of New York City. Five officials overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in Washington stepped down soon after.

The conflagration originated in the back-and-forth between Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Alex Spiro and William A. Burck, and the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, exchanges which have not been previously reported.

The series of events — in which the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department seemed to guide criminal defense lawyers toward a rationale for dropping charges against a high-profile client — represents an extraordinary shattering of norms for an agency charged with enforcing the laws of the United States.

It also sends a message that, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department will make prosecutorial decisions based not on the merits of a case but on purely political concerns, longtime prosecutors and defense lawyers said.

The corruption will continue until morale improves.