Ex-Kavanaugh Clerk Calls Out Trump DOJ in Defiant Resignation Letter
The U.S. Army veteran said the DOJ will have to find a “fool” or “coward” to officially drop Eric Adams’ bribery charges.
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
A federal prosecutor went out in style Friday, penning a defiant resignation letter that grilled Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and called out his former attorney.
Hagan Scotten, 49, maintained there is still “ample” evidence New York City Mayor Eric Adams engaged in bribery. He said he refused to drop charges over a political deal that requires Adams to cooperate with federal immigration officials.
“Any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” he said.
Scotten, a U.S. Army veteran who earned two bronze stars in Iraq, addressed his letter to Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who is Trump’s former personal attorney.
Hagan Scotten’s resignation letter.
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He suggested Bove will have to find a MAGA minion to replace him if she wants Adams’ charges to be dropped as part of what appears to be a quid pro quo deal.
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten added. “But it was never going to be me.”
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Scotten studied law at Harvard after serving in the Middle East. He went on to clerk for the conservative Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and for Brett Kavanaugh (before he was appointed to the high court). Scotten then became a seasoned prosecutor in New York, working on a number of corruption cases, CNN reported.
His four-paragraph resignation letter went instantly viral on Friday. He is the seventh prosecutor to resign over Trump’s effort to dismiss charges against Adams, but is the first to lay out his reasoning in such detail.
Scotten broke down his opposition to justification into two parts: “The first justification for the motion—that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys—is so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”
The second, he suggested, was more egregious: “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
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