Three prosecutors resign over Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case, defy DOJ ‘order’ to admit wrongdoing

Three Manhattan federal prosecutors on Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case resigned in protest Tuesday — accusing the Justice Department of pressuring them to say they regretted bringing the case.

Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach and Derek Wikstrom ripped DOJ Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for leaning on them to lie and “express regret” about the case — which charged Adams with taking travel perk bribes from Turks — in order to get their jobs back.

“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” the three prosecutors, who had been placed on “administrative leave,” wrote in a scathing one-page letter obtained by The Post.

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The DOJ under President Trump “has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington,” the prosecutors wrote.

“That is wrong.”

The departures come after the judge in Adams’ case, Dale Ho, stressed in a recent ruling that the prosecutors handling the case had merely been following the law.

“The record before the Court indicates that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York prosecutors who worked on this case followed all appropriate Justice Department guidelines. There is no evidence — zero — that they had any improper motives,” the judge wrote.

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Rohrbach, Cohen and Wikstrom noted that they’d worked for the prestigious SDNY office — which is overseeing high-profile trials like the Sean “Diddy” Combs case — under both Republican and Democrat presidents.

They’d been allowed to do their jobs “without fear or favor,” they wrote. 

Rohrbach was part of the team that prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell, while Cohen handled several mob cases.

The resignations came on the first day that Trump’s pick to lead SDNY, Jay Clayton, took over on an interim basis. 

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An office spokesman declined to comment.

Five prosecutors have now resigned from SDNY since the DOJ pushed in February to kill Adams’ case.

The then-interim SDNY head Danielle Sassoon accused the White House in her resignation letter of working out a crooked “quid pro quo” deal in which Adams agreed to cater to Trump’s demands on immigration policy in exchange for having his case dropped. 

The lead prosecutor on the Adams case, Hagan Scotten, has resigned as well.

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The move to quash the case was led by top DOJ officials Blanche and Emil Bove, who formerly were Trump’s criminal defense lawyers.

Blanche claimed in a statement Tuesday that “there was nothing ‘illegal’ or ‘unethical’ about the Department of Justice dismissing the flawed prosecution against Mayor Adams.”

“Any suggestion to the contrary by anybody, especially former federal prosecutors, is wrong and disingenuous,” added Blanche, who once worked as an SDNY prosecutor himself.

Adams has denied wrongdoing and has repeatedly claimed that the case against him was political retribution for speaking out against President Joe Biden’s handling of the US border.

His camp has also argued that former Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams brought the case to boost his own political career, citing an op-ed he wrote shortly after leaving office.

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Adams has agreed in recent weeks to resurrect the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Rikers Island, fulfilling a key demand made by Trump’s border czar Tom Homan.

Ho, before tossing the case, wrote that the evidence showed Trump’s DOJ had struck a political “bargain” with Adams.

“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” he said in a 78-page ruling.

— Additional reporting by Joe Marino