For a prosecutor to drop a case for political reasons is an appalling breach of professional ethics. That’s exactly what seems to have happened in the Trump Justice Department’s move to dismiss the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
Opinion The Washington Post
When the guardrails holding back law enforcement fail
D.C. federal prosecutor’s resignation signals a dangerous instinct on the part of the Trump DOJ.
February 20, 2025
This episode may not sound terribly alarming: It boiled down to whether there was an adequate basis for federal prosecutors to order a bank to freeze funding for climate projects. But it signals a dangerous instinct on the part of the Trump Justice Department to misuse laws to pursue and punish political enemies.
One of the touchstones of criminal law is that investigators and prosecutors don’t get to root around in people’s affairs hunting for crimes. As set out in Justice Department guidelines, they need to have a basis — the legal term is “predication” — for believing a crime may have taken or is taking place.
This isn’t a high standard — anything but. It doesn’t require the probable cause required to obtain a search warrant, for example — just “information or an allegation indicating” the possible commission of a crime.
Which is precisely why we should be so worried that Denise Cheung, a 24-year Justice Department veteran and head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office, felt she could not in good conscience comply with demands that she launch a criminal investigation and order the bank to freeze the funds.
Cheung set out what happened in a letter of resignation to interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin. A man who had no prosecutorial experience but had shown loyalty to Trump as a leader in the “Stop the Steal” movement and a defender of Jan. 6 rioters, Martin is emerging as one of the more dangerous characters in the Trump Justice Department.
Cheung’s account of their interactions is complex and technical, but it sketches a department not only bent on exercising extraordinary top-down control to execute Trump’s political priorities but also willing to stretch, if not ignore, fundamental legal principles in the service of that goal.
On Monday, Cheung was asked, based on information supplied by the office of acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, to open a criminal investigation and issue grand jury subpoenas over whether federal contracts — identified in other reports as $20 billion in Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grants for climate change initiatives — had been unlawfully awarded.
“Action had to be taken that day” because of fear that the contract recipients could continue to draw down funds, Cheung wrote she was told in her resignation letter. “I conferred with others in the Office, all of whom have substantial white collar criminal prosecution experience … in determining whether the predicate for opening such a grand jury investigation existed.”
It didn’t, in their view.
Nonetheless, she wrote, “Despite assessing that the existing documents on their face did not seem to meet this threshold, an ODAG [Office of the Deputy Attorney General] representative stated that he believed sufficient predication existed, including in the form of a video where statements were made by a former political appointee of the executive agency in question.”
The video in question appears to be one made by the right-wing Project Veritas, featuring a low-level EPA political appointee who boasted in a surreptitiously recorded video that the Biden administration was “trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they come in and stop it all. … It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing, like, gold bars off the edge.”
With the career prosecutors resisting launching a grand jury investigation on what they considered a flimsy basis and the political officials insistent on going forward, the group settled on a compromise: issuing a “freeze letter” requesting that the bank holding the climate change funds halt making payments.
Despite the federal holiday, the FBI’s Washington Field Office was alerted to help draft the letter. But FBI officials were also leery of acting precipitously, Cheung wrote, “expressing some concern about the current lack of evidence of any apparent crime and the need to send out any such freeze letter.”
The FBI sought bureaucratic cover from Cheung, who complied in the form of an email confirming that prosecutors believe “there may be conduct that constitutes potential violations” of federal conspiracy and wire fraud law. Based on that, the FBI sent a letter to Citibank recommending a 30-day freeze on disbursing funds. Cheung had her reservations, but one of the striking things in her account is how hard she and others tried to satisfy the demands of Trump’s operatives at Main Justice.
That wasn’t enough for Martin, the new U.S. Attorney in D.C. He didn’t want a recommendation letter but one, signed by himself and Cheung, “ordering the bank not to release any funds … pursuant to a criminal investigation.”
The “quantum of evidence did not support that action,” Cheung responded. “Because I believed that I lacked the legal authority to issue such a letter, I told you that I would not do so,” she wrote to Martin. “You then asked for my resignation.”
So here we are. Frantic to spin up their case about the Biden administration’s supposed misuse of funds, Trump political appointees were willing to override basic legal rules to get their way.
What about the next time — because this incident surely won’t be the last. Think of all the individuals that Trump has declared should be behind bars for committing unspecified crimes.
The chilling lesson of Cheung’s encounter is that political appointees will barrel through the guardrails that are intended to prevent the massive powers of law enforcement from being deployed without an adequate basis in facts and law. The Trump officials will roll over any career prosecutors or FBI agents who dare to stand in their way.
And lest you think these are overwrought imaginings, consider Martin’s newly proclaimed “Operation Whirlwind,” probing the supposed “storm of threats” to government workers, including U.S. DOGE Service employees. Martin dispatched letters to Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), demanding that he “clarify” comments he made in March 2020 that conservative Supreme Court justices “will pay the price” of their rulings.
Schumer apologized the next day for the remarks, but more to the point: Real prosecutors don’t announce their investigations on X. They keep silent unless and until there are charges to bring.
Who will guard these “guardians”? Here I turn to the famous address by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, when he served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attorney general. “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America,” Jackson said in 1940, adding, “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”
This is a dangerous moment, and we should heed Jackson’s warning: “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
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comments express deep concern over the perceived politicization and
weaponization of the Department of Justice under Trump's administration,
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