Hochul must remove Adams
By 
Here’s a crucial detail about the Thursday afternoon massacre:
The Justice Department’s order to dismiss charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams triggered a series of resignations Thursday and ignited a feud between top Trump appointees and career prosecutors.
The departures started with Danielle Sassoon, a longtime federal prosecutor who refused to comply with the demand to drop the Adams case. President Trump had elevated Sassoon to be the acting Manhattan U.S. attorney after he took office.
Others followed suit, including Kevin Driscoll, the senior-most career official in the Justice Department’s criminal division, and John Keller, head of the department’s public-integrity section. They left when it became clear they would be ordered to dismiss the case after Sassoon refused, people familiar with the matter said. Three other supervisors in the Justice Department’s public-integrity unit also resigned Thursday, one of the people said.
[…]
The chain reaction started Monday, when Bove issued an unusual directive to drop the bribery case against Adams. The directive cited grounds that the mayor was targeted for political reasons and that the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to fight illegal immigration and violent crime, both Trump administration priorities.
The department explicitly reserved the right to revive the case later, giving the Trump administration powerful leverage over the big-city Democrat.
The refusal of the apparent child of Roy Cohn and Sal Tessio who is serving as the deputy Attorney General to dismiss the case with prejudice takes the corruption up to 11, especially combined with the quiet-parts-loud assertion that wanting Adams to collaborate with the Trump administration’s immigration policy was the critical reason for temporarily dropping the prosecution.
But for now I want to discuss the tenure of Adams as mayor of New York and whether Gov. Kathy Hochul should remove him from office, something the state constitution gives her the power to do.
Ever since news of the criminal investigation into Adams became public, voices have been calling on him to either resign or be removed from office. Those voices grew louder when he was indicted last September. Before Monday I never agreed with those calls. Adams is a duly elected mayor and he is innocent of the crimes charged until proven guilty. In my mind it’s simply not warranted and may not even be legitimate for Hochul to do this, notwithstanding the power she holds to do so.
That all changed on Monday when we learned — though we didn’t yet have the explicit proof we got today — that President Trump had set up an arrangement in which he was essentially blackmailing the mayor into letting ICE run free through the city in exchange for his freedom. We now know — not terribly surprisingly — that this is a deal Adams happily entered into or negotiated. But that doesn’t change the essential point: the mayor’s will is no longer his own. It also doesn’t matter whether you support giving ICE the keys to the city. What matters is that the mayor’s will is no longer his own. He’s controlled by Donald Trump.
Now, no elected official ever acts uninfluenced by others. No person does. But Donald Trump controls Adams’ freedom. That’s totally different. As I said yesterday, there might as well be a hostage taker holed up in Gracie Mansion with a gun to the mayor’s head. This is no longer about Mayor Adams or what he might have done in the past or what crimes he might be guilty of. The injured party is the people of New York City. The people of New York elected and are entitled to a mayor who controls his own will, who is free to make his own decisions. They currently do not have one. New Yorkers didn’t elect Donald Trump to be mayor. But under the current arrangement, he is the mayor. The governor has a responsibility to restore democratic governance to the city by removing the mayor from office.
I agree with JMM that the removal power is one that should be used very sparingly, and certainly not over ordinary policy disagreement, or even corruption charges that have not been proven in court. But you can’t have a mayor who is being openly blackmailed by the executive branch of the federal government. The electorate of NYC deserves a mayor who reflects their interests rather than being the coerced puppet of the president.