New York lawyer Hagan Scotten has a mettlesome CV and is clearly not a person to be trifled with. He was an award-winning law student and a decorated member of the US Army who completed three tours of Iraq, before rising to become an assistant US attorney. But none of those achievements has attracted anything like the attention accorded to a lacerating resignation letter which went viral last week.

Scotten took against an instruction from the US deputy attorney general Emil Bove to drop fraud charges against New York mayor Eric Adams. He accused the government of using the carrot of dismissing charges – or the stick of threatening to bring them again – to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.

Scotten declared that it was perhaps understandable that a ‘chief executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal’. But he added, witheringly: ‘Any assistant US attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials. 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. But it was never going to be me.’

Ouch.

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