NEW YORK — Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned Thursday, three days after President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice asked her to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, a source told The New York Daily News.

The stunning development came amid widespread speculation as to whether she would follow through on the directive and after Trump placed her in the top job role in an acting capacity on his first full day in office.

Sassoon, who quit shortly before 2 p.m., according to the source who informed the Daily News, said in a remarkable letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday that she believed Adams should, if anything, face more charges for destroying and instructing others to get rid of evidence and providing false information to the FBI. She said a superseding indictment she planned to bring would also have expanded on allegations that the mayor criminally engaged in an illicit straw donor scheme.

The Monday night directive to Sassoon from interim Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, said she should ask Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho to dismiss the case at least in part to allow the mayor to focus on supporting Trump’s hard-line immigration policies in the country’s largest sanctuary city. It said the case may later be revived, suggesting it would be put on ice for most of 2025 while Adams runs for reelection, giving Trump carte blanche to target New York City’s immigrant communities in the process.

In her searing letter to Bondi obtained by the Daily News, Sassoon said abandoning the case so Adams could placate Trump’s policies would “amplify, rather than abate, concerns about weaponization of the Department.” She noted it’s “considered misconduct for an attorney” to “induce or coerce” the dropping of criminal charges based on “political activity” like assistance in immigration enforcement.

“Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case,” Sassoon wrote.

“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.”

Sassoon revealed she attended a meeting on Jan. 31 with Adams’ legal team, in which she said the mayor’s attorneys “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” She said Bove, Trump’s acting No. 2 at DOJ, “admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting” and seized them afterward.

A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, who confirmed Sassoon’s second-in-command, Matthew Podolsky, was now leading it, declined to comment. Sassoon could not be reached.

Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, denied the claim he’d dangled a quid pro quo as “a total lie.”

“We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us,” he said. “We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement and we truthfully answered it did.”

Of the potential additional charges Sassoon cited in her letter to Bondi, Spiro called the admission “the parting shot of a prosecution exposed as a sham.”

The mayor has wasted no time getting in line with Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown. On Thursday, after meeting with the president’s border czar, Tom Homan, he announced he would be taking executive action to allow federal immigration officials to operate on Rikers Island, a move at odds with the city’s sanctuary city policies.

In a later appearance on WABC radio, Adams said he had God to thank and praised Trump and his immigration agenda.

“I’m just happy I now have a partner,” Adams said.

In a remarkable letter formally accepting Sassoon’s resignation, first reported by "ABC News," Bove scolded her for “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case” and “insubordination and apparent misconduct.”

He said he was placing on administrative leave two of the case’s lead prosecutors, highly regarded Assistant U.S. Attorneys Hagan Scotten and Derek Wikstrom, for supporting Sassoon’s decision and that the DOJ’s new “weaponization” task force would “evaluate” all three.

The task force is also probing authorities who put Trump on trial after his first term, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose cases resulted in Trump’s historic criminal conviction for falsifying New York business records and around a half billion dollars in fines for committing rampant fraud while running his real estate empire.

Bove represented Trump in the criminal case. It’s not yet clear what the task force’s reviews may lead to.

Bove said the SDNY, renowned for acting independently of whoever’s in the White House, had “demonstrated itself to be incapable of fairly and impartially” handling Adams’ case and that it would be transferred to the public integrity section in Washington, D.C. The New York Times reported later Thursday that the two men leading that office, Kevin Driscoll and John Keller, resigned in protest following the case’s transferal.

Bove shed light on how Sassoon, a registered Republican who clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, quickly pushed back when Trump’s senior DOJ officials started asking her to take actions she was not comfortable with, noting she asked why Trump couldn’t just pardon the mayor if he so wished.

Bove’s letter and his Monday night directive repeated claims by the mayor that he was unfairly targeted because he’d criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant crisis and that former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who brought the case, created prejudicial pretrial publicity by creating a personal website after he left office and writing an op-ed for City & State commenting generally on corruption in New York. Prosecutors have pointed out the case couldn’t have been brought as retaliation for Adams’ criticisms of Biden, with their probe beginning months before he even became mayor.

The case filed last September accuses Adams of abusing his government positions starting over a decade ago by accepting luxury benefits, including first-class flights and opulent hotel stays worldwide from wealthy foreign businessmen and officials in or close to the authoritarian-leaning Turkish government looking to gain influence over him.

The feds say Adams began soliciting and accepting illegal campaign donations from foreign nationals when he made clear he would run for mayor around 2018, which were funneled through U.S. citizens and multiplied by eight with taxpayer dollars through the city’s public matching funds program. He denies all charges and had been set to defend them at a trial scheduled for April 21.

The prosecution stemmed from a wide-ranging investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, and the city Department of Investigation.

In a statement Thursday, city DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber said that the agency “conducted its work apolitically, guided solely by the facts and the law.”

Monday’s order came as Adams’ legal woes were heating up. The feds recently secured the guilty plea of Erden Arkan, a Brooklyn real estate magnate who admitted to organizing straw donations for the mayor at his behest, and last week signaled a former top Adams aide, Mohamed Bahi, would soon cop to wire fraud charges related to similar crimes.

Sassoon was expected to lead the SDNY until the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, his former Securities and Exchange Commission Chief Jay Clayton. Before Trump put her in the position on his first day in office, the 38-year-old respected prosecutor took the lead on some of the SDNY’s most significant cases, including prosecuting convicted crypto con man Sam Bankman-Fried.

Thursday’s developments sent shockwaves through New York’s legal community. A former Manhattan federal prosecutor who recently left the office said he was aghast.

“This will become known as the Thursday afternoon massacre,” the lawyer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Trump administration, said in reference to President Richard Nixon’s infamous 1973 DOJ purge.

“For anyone who takes the impartial enforcement of criminal justice in this country seriously, it’s appalling.”

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