Manhattan’s U.S. attorney Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.

The resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Donald Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department.

The departures of the U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, and the officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, came in rapid succession Thursday. Days earlier, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Emil Bove, had ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the case against Adams.

The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Adams from fully cooperating with Trump’s immigration crackdown. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.

Sassoon, in a letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Bove’s order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.”

Sassoon, 38, wrote that the mayor’s lawyers had “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.”

A lawyer for Adams, Alex Spiro, said, “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie.”

Bove accepted Sassoon’s resignation in his own eight-page letter Thursday, in which he blasted her handling of the case.

He told her the prosecutors who had worked on the case against Adams were being placed on administrative leave because they, too, were unwilling to obey his order.

Matthew Podolsky, who had been Sassoon’s deputy, is now the acting U.S. attorney, a spokesperson for the office said Thursday evening.

On Thursday afternoon, according to a pool report, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had not asked for the case against Adams to be dropped.

The New York Times Services