A top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., abruptly resigned on Tuesday after she declined a request from Trump administration officials to freeze assets of a government contractor, saying she had insufficient evidence to do so.
In her resignation letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, the prosecutor, Denise Cheung, who oversaw the office’s criminal division, described how the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, had asked her to step down after she refused to order a bank to freeze accounts of an unnamed contractor.
Mr. Martin — in coordination with the office of Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official — pushed Ms. Cheung to quickly open a criminal investigation into the vendor, which included securing subpoenas from a federal grand jury, and freezing the contractor’s unspent assets, she said.
“I still do not believe that there is sufficient evidence to issue” a so-called freeze letter to the unidentified bank, wrote Ms. Cheung, a 24-year veteran of the department.
In her letter, she cited the lack of “sufficient evidence” of possible criminal activity and questioned the effort by officials working for Mr. Bove to “bypass” the usual chain of command by intervening directly on the matter.
The apparent interest in ordering a freeze is believed to stem from an effort, spearheaded by Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to claw back $20 billion in grants awarded for clean-energy and other environmental projects under the Biden administration, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.
Ms. Cheung’s resignation comes at a moment of rising turbulence and discord at the Justice Department, as President Trump and his appointees seek to exert control over law enforcement actions — putting them in conflict with nonpolitical career prosecutors who say these actions violate accepted practices and undermine the rule of law.
Last week, seven career officials, in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and at department headquarters in Washington, resigned rather than move to dismiss federal corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, saying the request was inappropriate.
A spokesman for Mr. Martin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Cheung’s refusal to comply was not an act of heroism, a department spokesman said, but rather a failure to follow the chain of command.
Ms. Cheung said the initial impetus for the action had come on Monday from officials in the Justice Department’s office of the deputy attorney general, currently run by Mr. Bove, who has emerged as the administration’s main enforcer on matters of federal law enforcement.
While freeze orders are not uncommon — and the deputy attorney general’s office is responsible for overseeing U.S. attorneys — the timing of this one was highly unusual, Ms. Cheung suggested. She was given her instructions on Monday, a national holiday, and ordered to obtain the bank freeze by the end of the day — a period she deemed far too rushed to allow for the prosecutorial judgment required to take such an intrusive step.
“I was told that there was time sensitivity and action had to be taken that day because there was concern the contract awardees could continue to draw down” payments, she wrote.
A lawyer working in Mr. Bove’s office suggested language for the freeze letter saying the government had probable cause to believe the funds were subject to federal forfeiture. But Ms. Cheung told them that the claim was not appropriate, given the paucity of proof at such an early stage.
Eventually, the F.B.I.’s Washington field office agreed to issue a recommendation to the bank that the assets be frozen. But Mr. Martin was not satisfied and demanded that Ms. Cheung co-sign a new, more forceful letter to supersede it, which she refused to do.
“Because I believed I lacked the legal authority to issue such a letter, I told you I would not do so,” she added near the end of the three-page letter to Mr. Martin. “You then asked for my resignation.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington has been rocked by the arrival of Mr. Martin, a right-wing activist with close ties to the White House and no previous prosecutorial experience.
Last month, Mr. Martin tasked Ms. Cheung with investigating the charging of hundreds of people in the pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Supreme Court later ruled that the federal obstruction statute used to indict those rioters had been too broadly applied.
In an emotional all-staff email on Monday, Ms. Cheung thanked her colleagues.
“This office is a special place,” she wrote. “I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.”
Ms. Cheung said prosecutors in the office had conducted themselves “with the utmost integrity” by “following the facts and the law and complying with our moral, ethical and legal obligations.”
The resignation came less than a day after Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Martin to run the office permanently. Mr. Martin sat on a board that raised cash for the Jan. 6 rioters, and pushed for their mass reprieve.
Hours after Ms. Cheung stepped down, Mr. Trump announced on social media that he was firing any remaining Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys remaining on the job. Although he billed it as a drastic gesture to “clean house,” replacing holdovers is generally a given whenever a new party wins the White House — and the remaining Biden appointees were winding down their operations anyway.
In a separate move, Mr. Martin told his staff on Friday that he was planning to hire about 20 more line prosecutors, according to an email obtained by The Times.
His announcement of the hires came a little more than two weeks after top officials at the Justice Department fired more than a dozen rank-and-file prosecutors who had been brought into the office to work on cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
