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Pride and Prejudice at the DOJ
Pride
I cannot understand lawyers like Emil Bove, the guy spearheading the effort to purge the Department of Justice of anyone who doesn’t think Donald Trump hung the moon (or won the 2020 election). Bove who prosecuted January 6 cases aggressively, is now working to get rid of the lawyers who did the same thing. What kind of person does that? Do we think his mom is proud of him?
There are — were — other, better lawyers at DOJ, public servants of whom we, and their moms, can rightly be proud. Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten resigned their positions in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York rather than participate in the blackmailing of Eric Adams. Both of these lawyers are former law clerks for (as it happens, conservative) Supreme Court justices. In the legal recruiting world, that’s as good as it gets. They can’t be bullied by threats of unemployment. These lawyers “could have gone anywhere”; they chose to work for the people of the United States. The lawyers in the Public Integrity section of the DOJ who resigned when ordered to dismiss the case against Adams made a similar choice. All of these lawyers chose to serve the public. By quitting, they tell us that “public service” has been erased from their job descriptions. Kudos to them all.