New Yorkers, despite our reputation for being cantankerous, agree on many things—primarily things we dislike: rats; subway crime; our mayor, Eric Adams.

Adams’s polling was dismal well before he was indicted on federal corruption charges. A 2023 Quinnipiac University poll put his approval rating at 28 percent—the lowest result for a mayor since Quinnipiac began polling New York voters, in 1996. Adams got negative marks on every measure: the city’s handling of homelessness, education, crime, migrants, and the budget. But perhaps most notable were respondents’ views of Adams, the man. More than half of New Yorkers felt that he had poor leadership qualities, didn’t understand people like them, and wasn’t honest or trustworthy. (Less scientific, but equally telling: For the past couple of years, a meme has circulated of a “Club Promoter” Halloween-costume pack featuring a photo of Mayor Adams and the words Includes: Nothing helpful.)

Mayor Adams’s low popularity had as much to do with the chaos and swirl of corruption around his administration as it did with residents’ dissatisfaction with his management of the city. Much like our president, Adams favored putting friends and relatives in positions of power. He installed one friend as chancellor of education and made another his senior adviser on public safety and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. After the charges against Adams were announced, a number of his associates were indicted too. Many others have since resigned. (Adams pleaded not guilty and maintained that the case was politically motivated.)

Reading the Southern District’s indictment was, for many New Yorkers, simply confirmation of what we’d long suspected: Our mayor was an arrogant egoist using his position to enhance his and his cronies’ lifestyle. It was also embarrassing. Adams’s charges—for conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign businesspeople—center on allegations that he did real-estate favors for the Turkish government in return for free travel and perks on Turkish Airlines. I can’t help but feel that a city as great as this one deserves, at the very least, corruption more sophisticated and ambitious than Adams’s alleged attempts to score flight upgrades.

[Read: What Trump is getting from Eric Adams]

Maybe the crimes go deeper. But now we may never know, because Donald Trump’s administration has ordered prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams. Emil Bove III, a Trump appointee in the Justice Department, has argued that the charges were politically motivated and the dismissal necessary because the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to govern. It was, he wrote, a threat to “public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

To anyone who believes Bove’s claims that the investigation into Adams was a “weaponization” of the federal government: I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Immigration initiatives is the key phrase here—Adams has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in December hosted Trump’s border czar at Gracie Mansion. After that meeting, Adams said he might consider an executive order to “unravel” immigration rules that he sees as restrictive. The impression is that he has pledged to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda in return for his protection.

The Trump administration’s meddling is a perversion of the principles of the Department of Justice, and at least six prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned in protest. But more than that, it is an insult to the intelligence and common sense of New Yorkers. Today, a judge will hear from Justice Department lawyers and decide whether to grant the administration’s request. If the case is dropped, the mayor’s constituents will be deprived of the opportunity to see him held accountable, and they will be saddled with a mayor who is beholden not to the will of the people but to Trump.

Trump won 30 percent of New York City voters. His national “mandate” is debatable, but in the city it doesn’t exist, in part because so many people reject Trump’s dangerous belief that a president is above the law. Now the Trump administration is telling New Yorkers to apply that logic not just to their president but to their mayor as well.

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

One thing the Trump administration gets right is that Adams’s legal troubles are a distraction from doing his job. Back in 2023, when a number of his personal aides had their phones seized, Adams bailed on an important meeting with the White House and congressional leaders about New York’s migrant population. Last week, Kathryn Wylde, from the business advocacy group Partnership for New York, said that the controversies had “derailed” the execution of many policy goals.

After the indictment became public, nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers said Adams should resign. A true public servant would do that, but Adams is a mayor for our times, and seems to care less about serving the public than about serving himself. One of the protesting officials described succinctly in her own resignation letter what she saw as a “quid pro quo”: “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” (Bove and Adams denied any improper quid pro quo.) Adams has not just agreed to be Trump’s puppet: He went to the administration and brought his own strings.

Regardless of what the judge decides, there is someone who can do something: Governor Kathy Hochul, who could—and should—just fire the mayor already.

To many non–New Yorkers, this scandal might seem an abstraction—the way the Los Angeles fires might feel if you’re in Nebraska, or how a Texas school shooting might feel when you’re all the way in Maine. But what’s happening in New York should matter to all Americans, because it is yet another example of the president imposing his own agenda over the law and public consensus. He pardoned the January 6 rioters, renamed Mount McKinley, turned an astonishing proportion of the government over to Elon Musk—and now there’s Eric Adams. In each instance, Trump is sending a message: I’m in charge, whether you like it or not

A criminal case is not a chit. It’s not something you trade in exchange for political favors.

Perhaps the always-transactional President Donald Trump does not understand the importance of keeping the Department of Justice independent from partisan politics. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should.

Seven lawyers have now resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order to file a motion to dismiss the indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was charged in September in a public-corruption case. The Trump administration’s handpicked interim U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, quit rather than file the motion. According to a memo from Bove, Sassoon was directed to dismiss the case, not because of the merits of the case, but on the grounds that the charges were politically motivated and that they would interfere with Adams’s abilities to enforce violent-crime and immigration laws. A particularly galling detail of the directive was that the case be dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning that it could be filed again—a detail that created at least the impression that the Trump administration would be keeping Adams on a short leash to ensure his compliance with its wishes. Threatening prosecution for political gain is a violation of legal ethics.

[Quinta Jurecic: What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order?]

According to Sassoon’s own account, she appealed to the attorney general, to no avail, and resigned yesterday. In a letter to Bondi, Sassoon wrote that her duty to administer the law impartially included “prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, either for the defendant or those who appointed me.” Her firm stance triggered a cascade of resignations throughout the Department of Justice, from five lawyers at DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who similarly refused to file the motion to dismiss. Bove suspended the two assistant U.S. attorneys working on the case with Sassoon.

On Friday, one of those prosecutors, Hagan Scotten, resigned in a scathing letter to Bove. He called the accusation about political motivation for the indictment “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.” He said the other purported reason for the dismissal was even worse, blasting Bove’s use of criminal charges “to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” which he called “a violation of our laws and traditions.” He closed: “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.”

Ultimately, a senior lawyer at the Public Integrity Section filed the motion, in an apparent effort to spare others from losing their jobs. It is easy to say all of the lawyers in the section should have resigned, but like many Americans, government lawyers have mortgages, child care, tuition, and other bills to pay. Moreover, if all 30 lawyers in the Public Integrity Section were to resign, they would in all likelihood be replaced with Trump loyalists, who would no doubt bear very little resemblance to the title of the section where they would work. One hopes that the judge assigned to the case will hold a hearing before granting the motion to dismiss, putting Bove under oath to explain his efforts, which so clearly seem to undermine the department’s integrity.

Lest anyone believe that Sassoon and Scotten are some sort of Democratic Party operatives, both have sterling conservative credentials. Sassoon is a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and an active member of the Federalist Society. Scotten is a military veteran, two-time Bronze Star recipient, and former law clerk to then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Supreme Court Chief Justice John R. Roberts Jr. This is not about party politics. It is about the Department of Justice’s responsibility to uphold the law.

I know from my 20 years as a federal prosecutor that DOJ lawyers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to carry out the president’s political agenda. While they may be expected to honor the president’s enforcement priorities, they are—or, at least, were—insulated from direct political control over any particular case in order to ensure the fair administration of justice and the public trust. The Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution specifically state that prosecutors may not consider “political association, activities, or beliefs” when making charging decisions. In addition, for the past 40 years, attorneys general have restricted communications between the White House and DOJ attorneys to protect their decisions from political influence.

[Read: Another edgelord comes to power]

Imagine a world where a president could use the threat of criminal charges or the promise to dismiss them as a way of coercing a public official to advance his policy agenda. Rather than serving the voters who elected that official in good faith, such a person would be beholden to the president, doing his bidding for fear of the criminal consequences. A governor or a mayor who agreed to such terms could even break laws with impunity so long as he went along with the president’s agenda. That kind of arrangement would violate the rule of law—the concept that the law applies equally to everyone. Moreover, it could have disastrous consequences for countless people living in that official’s jurisdiction.

DOJ lawyers pride themselves on working for an organization that is unique among federal agencies in its independence from politics. The heroes of the department are the attorneys general throughout history who stood up for the rule of law—Robert Jackson, who also worked as a Nuremberg prosecutor; Elliot Richardson, who resigned rather than fire the independent counsel during the Nixon administration; and Edward Levi, who implemented the post-Watergate norms and principles that guide federal prosecutors to this day. In more recent times, Sally Yates accepted termination in 2017 rather than implement the first iteration of Trump’s clearly unconstitutional travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. It had to be amended twice before it was upheld by the Supreme Court.

And now add the Valentine’s Day Seven to that pantheon of DOJ heroes.

* Source Images: John Lamparski / Getty; Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty; Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg / Getty; Mikroman6 / Getty.

During his first term in office, Donald Trump loved to complain about judges on social media. Reliably, whenever his agenda was held up in court or his allies faced legal consequences, he would snipe online about “so-called judges” and a “broken and unfair” legal system. Now, in Trump’s second term, this genre of cranky presidential post has returned. A judge who blocked the administration’s mass freeze of federal-grant funding is “highly political” and an “activist,” according to the president.  

Read alongside Elon Musk’s and Vice President J. D. Vance’s apparent willingness to defy the courts, Trump’s rhetoric is a concerning sign about where this administration might be headed. But there is significance to the fact that the administration already has a hefty stack of court orders it might want to defy. Despite Trump’s effort to present himself as an agent of overwhelming force, he is encountering persistent and growing opposition, both from courts and from other pockets of civic life.

Litigants have sued the administration over the seemingly unlawful freezing of federal funds, the deferred-resignation program for civil servants, the destruction of USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the handling of sensitive government data by Musk’s aides, the removal of scientific data from government websites, the attempt to write birthright citizenship out of the Constitution, the barring of transgender people from military service, the transfer of undocumented immigrants to Guantánamo Bay, and more.

[Read: The tasks of an anti-Trump coalition]

And now the court orders are coming, blocking the administration from pushing forward, or at the very least slowing its speed.

Courts have prevented Trump from dismissing a government watchdog without explanation and granted restraining orders barring the administration from slashing funds for crucial scientific research. They have prevented Musk’s team from meddling with Treasury Department systems and insisted that the government halt its transfer of an incarcerated transgender woman to a men’s prison. Four separate judges have issued orders requiring the government to stand down on its effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.

Litigation has also proved to be a valuable tool for prying loose key information from the administration, like the specifics of just what access Musk’s aides were given to the Treasury Department, and as a means of making legible to the public what Trump is trying to get away with. “It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals,” Judge John Coughenour commented when issuing an injunction against the birthright-citizenship order. But, he went on, “in this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

So far, there’s no indication that Trump has attempted to ignore Judge Coughenour’s injunction. In other cases, though, troubling signs have emerged of the administration’s laxity in following court orders, including multiple instances in which judges have found agencies to be in defiance of the court’s instructions and attempts by the government to find work-arounds. It’s not yet clear how much of this stems from chaos and incompetence and how much is a strategy by Trump and Musk, however clumsy, to force a confrontation with the judiciary. Either way, this approach endangers the health of the constitutional order—which may well be the point.

If the administration decides to launch an assault against the judiciary, it will be all the more important that a strong response comes not only from the courts themselves, but from Congress and the public. Trump is skilled at presenting himself as the indomitable voice of a true American majority, creating a facade of consensus aided by the startling quiescence of congressional Republicans. Dissent, both loud and quiet, can crack that facade and make an illegitimate power grab apparent for what it is.

Some of that dissent is already coming from inside the executive branch. Over the course of a bizarre three weeks, the administration encouraged federal workers who had not yet been fired to depart their posts under a “deferred resignation” program clearly modeled on the buyouts Musk offered to Twitter employees after his takeover of that company. (The program closed on Wednesday after it was briefly frozen, and then unfrozen, by a federal judge.) But if the goal was to persuade federal workers to depart on their own, the slipshod rollout and smarmy, dismissive tone—one FAQ provided by the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find “higher productivity jobs in the private sector”—may have backfired. The Subreddit r/fednews is buzzing with government employees expressing defiance. “Before the ‘buyout’ memo, I was ready to go job hunting, but then a revelation hit,” wrote one user. “I took an oath under this position to the American people.” In reference to OPM’s description of the program as a “fork in the road,” some federal employees adopted the spoon as a symbol of their opposition. Earlier this week, federal workers rallied at a protest outside the Capitol holding signs that read Public Service is a Badge of Honor!

In Congress, the Democratic minority, which entered this second Trump era cautiously, seems to be waking up. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The New York Times in an interview published on February 2. Just two days later, though, Schumer was standing outside the Treasury Department leading a rally to protest Musk’s apparent takeover of the department’s sensitive payment systems. Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to drag out the confirmation of Russ Vought, the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive schemes, to head the Office of Management and Budget, and senators such as Brian Schatz of Hawaii have hinted at plans to escalate to even more dramatic procedural measures. “The roots of democracy are still strong,” Schatz told The New Yorker recently. “It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

This opposition movement will try to build on itself. The Democratic Party is taking more aggressive action in part because of an outraged constituency demanding that it speak up; that, in turn, may encourage Americans to push the party further. Spoon emoji, court orders, protests—all of these serve as indications that those who dissent are not alone. True, courageous leadership can emerge unexpectedly. Within the FBI, Acting Director Brian Driscoll has become a folk hero of sorts for his refusal to provide Justice Department leadership with the names of FBI agents to potentially be fired. Six Justice Department officials resigned yesterday rather than follow orders to dismiss the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: Granting the mayor a political favor would constitute “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent,” the acting leader of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York argued in a letter to Justice Department leadership, writing, “I cannot make such arguments consistent with my duty of candor” as an attorney. During a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to a U.S. military installation in Germany, an eighth grader organized a walkout at her middle school to protest Hegseth’s attacks on diversity efforts within the military.

The fact is that Trump is an unpopular president who eked out a razor-thin plurality of the popular vote and whose party holds the slimmest of majorities in the House. So far, he has been able to avoid that inconvenient reality by relying on executive orders. But March 14 is approaching, when the federal government will run out of money and House Republicans—never a compliant group at the best of times—will need to organize to pass a funding bill in order to avoid a shutdown. The limitations of Trump’s attempts to rule by decree, and the inability of his party to govern, may then become unavoidably apparent.