If our nation doled out awards for integrity in politics, two would have gone to Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who resigned in 1974 rather than obey a criminal president’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor.

There would be at least eight new acts of courage to reward today, as well as mourning for the scurrilous and unmerited firing for several “Biden area” prosecutors across the nation. That group includes Roger Handberg, who was appointed as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida in 2021 and served with honor and dignity until he was literally ordered to stop doing so.

In Trump’s books, Handberg’s doom was probably written before he or the president took office: With Central Florida a hotbed of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, it hardly mattered that Handberg was appointed after those investigations were well underway, or that he quickly earned praise for working with local officials on efforts to make Central Florida a safer place to live. His abrupt dismissal doesn’t change what he accomplished, or lessen the respect of those who appreciated his quiet leadership.

A principled departure

Meanwhile, the nation is applauding veteran attorneys Danielle Sassoon, Hagan Scotten and five other career U.S. Justice Department lawyers who resigned rather than carry out Trump’s dishonorable commands.

It was to drop all charges in a corruption indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, as a reward for promising to do whatever President Donald Trump demands of him on immigration.

The bargain itself is so corrupt that it reeks of extortion and obstruction of justice and grounds for disbarment. Attorney General Pam Bondi ought to be impeached for allowing it. The federal judge assigned to Adams’ case should refuse to dismiss the indictment and appoint a special prosecutor to pursue it. (As of press time, the judge’s decision in the case had not yet been announced.)

Brazenly explicit

The five-count Adams indictment, alleging illegal foreign campaign contributions and more than $100,000 in travel perquisites from Turkish nationals, was to be dismissed “without prejudice.” That means it could be refiled whenever the Democratic mayor of one of the nation’s most liberal cities doesn’t satisfy Trump.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove III, who’s one of Trump’s own former criminal defense lawyers, made it brazenly explicit.

“The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime,” Bove wrote.

On Fox & Friends, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, sat next to the humiliated mayor and elaborated.

“If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?”’ Homan boasted.

Sassoon, 38, was a career federal prosecutor for eight years when she was made acting U.S. attorney pending the confirmation of Trump’s appointee.

Genuine conservatives — which Trump and Bondi are not — would be proud of someone like Sassoon and regret losing her service.

A registered Republican, Federalist Society member, Harvard and Yale law graduate, she was a law clerk for conservative judges J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Her ‘sense of duty’

“Both men,” Sassoon told Bondi in her resignation letter, “instilled in me a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law …

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

The nation should also recognize the courage of Denise Cheung, the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington D.C., who quit after refusing to follow a directive to freeze $20 billion meant to fund climate-change initiatives approved under the Biden administration.

In her letter, Cheung said she quit after she was ordered to launch a criminal investigation into grant funding that had been placed in a Citibank account to fund grants to nonprofits. There was no evidence of legal wrongdoing, Cheung said in her resignation letter, but administration officials wouldn’t stop pushing for her to open a criminal investigation.

The furious dismissal of top Justice officials makes it clear: The two Americans most responsible for upholding the law are as contemptuous of it as an organized crime syndicate.

“He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Trump boasted on social media.

Bondi has made fools of the senators who voted to confirm her — including Florida’s Rick Scott and Ashley Moody.

Bondi’s rampage

On Bondi’s first day, she did away with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, curtailed enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as ordered by Trump, and created a “weaponization task force” to ransack the Justice Department for everyone who had an assigned role in investigating Trump or his accomplices.

The rampage will eliminate oversight of Russian propaganda on social media and incite U.S. corporations to commit bribery overseas. It will foster corruption like that of former New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, sentenced to 11 years in prison for selling his Washington influence to Egypt’s benefit.

Quashing FARA will “mean a lot more business for America,” Trump said.

What’s next? Changing the national motto to “in greed we trust?”

It was a conflict of interest for Bondi to have anything to do with neutering FARA. As a member of Trump booster Brian Ballard’s D.C. lobbying shop, she was a $115,000 a month registered foreign agent for Qatar.

Meanwhile, there have been mass firings at the FBI, reportedly instigated by Trump hatchet man Kash Patel, who awaits Senate confirmation to head the FBI. This isn’t the only area where blood is being shed by the gallon: the nation’s air-traffic control network has been targeted for mass firings, as has the U.S. Park Service and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where leadership is preparing to ban life- and sanity-saving medications and gut the nation’s vaccination system.

It would be impossible to overstate the danger in all this.

When the history of these times is written, if people are still free to tell it truthfully, there will be eternal shame for Trump and his accomplices in the Congress and elsewhere.

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