Danielle R. Sassoon shot like a laser through the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, with stints fighting violent crime and securities fraud as well as handling appeals before she was elevated, at age 38, to be its interim head.
There, just weeks into her tenure running the country’s most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office, she encountered an obstacle that has threatened to stall her rapid rise: the desire of President Trump’s administration to drop corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.
Given her experience — and bulletproof conservative credentials as a member of the Federalist Society — Ms. Sassoon seemed ready to lead an office that saw tumultuous times during Mr. Trump’s first term, when he fired two of its U.S. attorneys. In recent days, prosecutors have been watching Ms. Sassoon anxiously to see how she might respond to the Justice Department’s demand that she drop the Adams case, which she had supported in a court filing.
She has had long experience standing up for her values before skeptical audiences. Now she has to mediate between an office where that kind of independence is prized and an administration that has given an explicitly political order to end the Adams prosecution.
Through a spokesman, Ms. Sassoon declined to comment for this article.
Before the Adams case vaulted her into the spotlight, her life had been characterized by achievement that was noteworthy even in environments where achievement is the norm. Born and raised in New York City, she attended the Modern Orthodox Ramaz School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she was first in her class and received awards for academic excellence. In high school, she spent hours each day studying the Talmud, an effort that she has said prepared her to study law.
Rebecca Kaden, a close friend who met Ms. Sassoon right before they began their freshman year at Harvard University, said she always knew Ms. Sassoon would be a lawyer. The future U.S. attorney was cerebral, a dynamic thinker eager to discuss and debate ideas.
She wrote columns about Middle East politics for the student newspaper, one of them in her role as press secretary of Harvard Students for Israel, as well as a soft-focus profile of a classmate for “Scene,” a friend’s magazine project.
One of her classes, “Justice,” was taught by the professor Michael J. Sandel, in a packed auditorium of hundreds of students, some of whose comments received enthusiastic applause. In that class, Ms. Sassoon stood and delivered an outspoken argument against race-based affirmation action.
“You could argue that affirmative action perpetuates divisions between the races, rather than achieving the ultimate goal of race being an irrelevant factor in our society,” she said.
There was no applause when she finished.
But if she was unafraid to speak frankly with her peers, Ms. Sassoon could be soft-spoken with the mentors on campus. A family friend introduced her to the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who soon brought her on as a research assistant. Mr. Dershowitz said that Ms. Sassoon understood “all sides of all arguments” but recalled her as “diffident, reserved” and “shy.”
“She’ll very politely and very gently challenge you,” Mr. Dershowitz said, adding, “She was always interested in public service.”
After graduating from Harvard magna cum laude in 2008, Ms. Sassoon attended Yale Law School, known for its focus on public interest law. She graduated in 2011 and served in consecutive clerkships for conservative judges.
The first, J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the federal appeals court for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., recalled Ms. Sassoon as whip-smart and versatile — equally at home in the higher precincts of appellate law and before a jury.
He said he would not comment “in any way, shape or form” on decisions that Ms. Sassoon faces in the Adams case or in others. He added: “All I would say is that Danielle is someone who’s very principled and rigorously honest and plays it straight.”
She later clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Antonin Scalia, a giant of the conservative legal movement. In an essay after his death in 2016, she wrote, “Justice Scalia was my kind of feminist.
“He spared me no argumentative punches and demanded rigor from my work,” she added. “He taught me how to fire a pistol and a rifle, and made me feel like I had grit. He thickened my skin, which was the best preparation for a career in a male-dominated field.”
The year that she wrote the essay, Ms. Sassoon, a registered Republican, began working as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office, where political neutrality is a paramount value. Hired into the Southern District of New York under Preet Bharara, who had been appointed by President Barack Obama, she whisked through the general crimes and narcotics units before focusing on violent crime and securities fraud. She handled eight trials, including two murder cases.
In one trial, she won the conviction of Lawrence V. Ray on charges of extortion and sex trafficking related to his abuse of Sarah Lawrence College students. He received 60 years in prison.
She is best known for the fraud prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Ms. Sassoon grilled Mr. Bankman-Fried in a four-hour cross-examination, skewering him with a rat-a-tat line of questioning that contrasted his public statements with his private conduct. The columnist Joe Nocera, after observing the back and forth, wrote in The Free Press that Mr. Bankman-Fried was “a dead man walking.”
He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In 2023, under the U.S. attorney at the time, Damian Williams, Ms. Sassoon was promoted to co-chief of the criminal appeals unit, where she most likely would have reviewed the legal particulars of some of the office’s highest-profile cases — including its prosecution of Mayor Adams.
That was the position she held last month when the Trump administration elevated her to temporarily lead the office. Her tenure was expected to be relatively brief. She has a baby due in mid-March, and President Trump’s choice to lead the office permanently, Jay Clayton, is expected to sail through the Senate confirmation process.
She has been an active leader, attending social gatherings held by the office’s units and recently appearing in court to observe the sentencing of Robert Menendez, the former Democratic senator from New Jersey, on corruption charges. He received 11 years in prison.
Shortly after being named the interim U.S. attorney last month, Ms. Sassoon became involved in conversations about the case against Mayor Adams. On Jan. 31, she traveled to Washington, D.C., for an in-person meeting at the Justice Department to discuss the possibility of dropping the charges.
To friends, she seemed unfazed: Two days after the meeting, she and her husband, Adam Katz, threw a birthday party for her young daughter (Mr. Katz is co-founder of the investment firm Irenic Capital Management.)
This week, the department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, ordered Ms. Sassoon to drop the case in a memo, directing that she dismiss the pending charges “as soon as is practicable.”
Ms. Sassoon cannot dismiss the charges herself. She — or a prosecutor in her office — would have to ask the judge overseeing the case to do so. After Mr. Bove’s memo became public, veterans of the office quickly began to discuss among themselves how Ms. Sassoon might respond.
This month, Ms. Sassoon published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which she criticized President Biden for commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 “supposedly nonviolent offenders” without consulting the prosecutors or judges involved.
Ms. Sassoon wrote: “The lack of a considered decision-making process exhibited a disregard for the work and knowledge of prosecutors and judges.
“At this time of transition,” Ms. Sassoon added, “I look forward to doing my part to ensure that prosecutors can resume their noble work unimpeded, outside the limelight and in service of the public.”
