“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” wrote Hagan Scotten, the assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, to Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, in a resignation letter that became public on Friday. This made Scotten the seventh legal official in less than 24 hours to resign in response to Bove’s order that corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York be dropped.
By Friday evening, Bove clearly had found people who agreed to do the deed. In court filings on Friday evening, Edward Sullivan, along with Bove and Antoinette Bacon, asked a judge to withdraw the case. Reuters reported that Sullivan had volunteered in order “to spare other career staff from potentially being fired for refusing to do so.”
Sullivan came forward after Justice Department leadership called the entire public integrity section into a meeting in search of someone who would sign a court document to withdraw the charges — within one hour, according to The Times and the law professor and journalist Barbara McQuade.
In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment. In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.
Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.
In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.
The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle — the ones who quit, the one who folded and the ones who accepted Sullivan’s sacrifice — are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency? Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.