The Justice Department asked a court Friday to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, with a top official from Washington intervening after federal prosecutors in Manhattan rebuffed his demands to drop the case and some quit in protest.

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove, the department’s second-in-command, and lawyers from the department’s public integrity section and criminal division filed paperwork asking to end the case. They contend the case was marred by appearances of impropriety and said that letting it go on would interfere with the mayor’s reelection bid. A judge must still approve the request.

The filing came hours after prosecutors in the public integrity section — which handles corruption cases — were told their jobs could be at risk for not stepping forward to handle the matter, according to a person briefed on the discussions who insisted on anonymity to speak about a private meeting.The three-page dismissal motion bore Bove’s signature and the names of Edward Sullivan, the public integrity section’s senior litigation counsel, and Antoinette Bacon, a supervisory official in the department’s criminal division. No one from the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan, which brought the Adams case, signed the document.

The move came five days into a showdown between Justice Department leadership and its office in Manhattan, which has long prided itself on its independence.

At least seven prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington quit rather than carry out Bove’s directive to halt the case, including the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan and the acting chief of the public integrity section.

The Justice Department is seeking to dismiss Adams’ charges with the option of refiling them at a later date. Bove said earlier this week that the new Manhattan U.S. attorney can decide whether to refile the charges after the November election. Adams faces a Democratic primary in June, with several challengers lined up. His trial had been on track to be held in the spring.

Bove concluded that continuing the prosecution would interfere with Adams’ ability to govern, posing “unacceptable threats to public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies,” the dismissal motion said. Among other things, it said, the case caused Adams to be denied access to sensitive information necessary to help protect the city.

Bove on Monday directed Danielle Sassoon, a Republican serving as interim U.S. attorney in New York, to drop the charges against Adams. He argued President Donald Trump needed the mayor’s help to advance his immigration enforcement agenda. Bove also echoed claims that Adams has made without evidence that the case was retaliation for his criticism of Biden administration immigration policies.

Instead of complying, Sassoon resigned Thursday, along with five high-ranking Justice Department officials in Washington. A day earlier, she sent a letter to Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, asking her to meet and reconsider the directive to drop the case.

As Justice Department officials worked Friday to seize the case and end it, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan who worked for Sassoon and was involved in the Adams case resigned — and blasted Bove in the process.

Hagan Scotten wrote in a resignation letter to Bove that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to meet his demand to drop the charges.

Scotten, along with other prosecutors in the case against Adams, was suspended with pay on Thursday by Bove, who launched a probe of the prosecutors that he said would determine whether they kept their jobs.

Scotten is an Army veteran who earned two Bronze medals serving in Iraq as a Special Forces troop commander. He graduated from Harvard Law School at the top of his class in 2010 and clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

In a resignation letter to Bove, Scotten said he was “entirely in agreement” with Sassoon’s refusal to seek dismissal of charges that the mayor had accepted over $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and lavish travel perks from foreign nationals looking to buy his influence while he was Brooklyn borough president campaigning to be mayor.

In her letter, Sassoon accused Adams’ lawyers of offering what amounted to a “quid pro quo” on immigration enforcement when they met with Justice Department officials in Washington last month.

Adams’ lawyer Alex Spiro said Thursday that the allegation of a quid pro quo was a “total lie.”

“We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us,” Spiro said in an email to reporters. “We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement and we truthfully answered it did.”

On Friday, Adams denied there was any deal to make the case go away.

“I want to be crystal clear with New Yorkers: I never offered — nor did anyone offer on my behalf — any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. Never,” the mayor said in a statement.

In his resignation letter, Scotten wrote: “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”

The prosecutor said he was following “a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake.”

He said he could see how a president such as Trump, with a background in business and politics, “might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal.”

But Scotten said any prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”

He added: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

Adams pleaded not guilty to the charges in September but has recently bonded at times with Trump, who has criticized the case against Adams and said he was open to giving Adams, who was a registered Republican in the 1990s, a pardon.