But the attorney general at the time, Elliot L. Richardson, refused to fire Mr. Cox and chose to resign instead. The deputy attorney general, William D. Ruckelshaus, also refused to do so and was fired. The order was eventually carried out by Robert Bork, the solicitor general. (Mr. Nixon was impeached, and eventually resigned.)

What happened this week in the Adams case was the Saturday Night Massacre “on steroids,” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote on Thursday.

In both instances, there was a “clash between the president’s personal preferences and what Justice Department lawyers think the rule of law requires,” Mr. Vladeck said in an interview on Friday.

Danielle R. Sassoon, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, chose to offer her resignation on Thursday instead of dropping the Adams case. The lead prosecutor on the investigation, Hagan Scotten, has also announced his resignation.

Ms. Sassoon has accused the mayor’s lawyers of urging “what amounted to a quid pro quo” of assistance with the president’s immigration crackdown if the mayor’s case is dismissed. On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he had not asked for the case to be dropped.

But experts still see parallels with Mr. Nixon.

“You have a sword of Damocles hanging over the mayor in the event that he does not cooperate with the president and his immigration policy objectives,” said Juliet Sorensen, a former federal prosecutor and professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law who has also written a case book on public corruption and the law.

She said that it could be inferred by the directive that the mayor’s indictment could be reinstated. Mr. Nixon wanted to stave off the Watergate investigation and now, she said, Mr. Trump wants Mr. Adams to cooperate with his immigration policy agenda.

She also said that in both cases, career lawyers resigned in protest “as a matter of professional responsibility and refused to get in line behind a blatantly political objective.”

Since 1973, there have been plenty of examples of lawyers resigning rather than following directives given by their superiors, Mr. Vladeck said.

“But we haven’t seen this sort of large-scale resignation all because the lawyers refuse to do something the political masters wanted them to do since that Saturday night in 1973,” he said.

Garrett Graff, who has written a book about Watergate, said that comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre were “inescapable,” and even argued that what happened this week was worse.

“Nixon’s fight with the special prosecutor was a question of presidential power and executive authority,” Mr. Graff said. What is happening now, he said, is “even more fundamentally corrupting for the foundation and principles of the rule of law in American life, which is a Justice Department dropping legitimate charges against a public official in exchange for political favors.”

Mr. Vladeck said the resignations were likely to influence what happened to the mayor’s case and could lead courts to question the Justice Department’s credibility. The Adams case is being overseen by Judge Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan.

The resignations could also make it difficult for the department to recruit high-power lawyers like Ms. Sassoon and her colleagues, Mr. Vladeck said.

“These are the people you want in those jobs,” he said. “If you’re coming out of law school and you’re interested in a career public service, this is a flashing red light about whether you really want to go work for this particular department.”

Sharply differing interpretations of the classic 85-year-old speech, “The Federal Prosecutor,” figured prominently in an extraordinary exchange of letters on Thursday that led to the resignation of Danielle R. Sassoon after she refused to carry out the Trump administration’s command to drop the corruption prosecution of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

The two views reflect a schism in conservative legal thought over how prosecutors, now working for a Trump-led Justice Department, should balance their duty to obey orders from superiors with their obligation to follow their best understanding of the law. One view emphasizes caution, deliberation, and independent and decentralized judgment, while the other values top-down vigor in the service of policy goals that can seem transactional if not unprincipled.

The split could reshape not only the relationship between federal prosecutors around the country and their bosses in Washington, but also the limited but real discretion enjoyed by all sorts of other officials throughout the government. Thursday’s events, in other words, are emblematic of the ethos of the second Trump administration, one that requires federal workers to fall into line or be fired.

Ms. Sassoon, whose resignation led to a cascade of others, cited Mr. Jackson’s speech to argue that the administration’s directive was not the product of a good-faith difference of opinion but an assault on the rule of law.

She wrote that she could not ethically ask a judge to dismiss a case when she did not believe the law supported the move and quoted Mr. Jackson: “The prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society; when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”

Emil Bove III, who represented President Trump in three criminal cases and now serves as acting deputy attorney general, responded in accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation that federal prosecutors, like other members of the executive branch, are tasked with advancing the president’s goals. The case against Mr. Adams, Mr. Bove wrote, interfered with the mayor’s ability to address two of the administration’s key priorities, immigration and violent crime.

“You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected president,” he wrote.

Mr. Jackson was 48 and just three months into his tenure as attorney general when he gave his speech, which is universally acknowledged to be the classic account of the prosecutor’s role. He had earlier served as solicitor general, the federal government’s top appellate lawyer, and he would go on, in addition to sitting on the Supreme Court, to be a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

A central point of his speech was that U.S. attorneys, the top federal law enforcement officials in the nation’s 94 judicial districts, should generally have the last word. Local prosecutors know the facts on the ground, the judges they appear before, the jury pool and “local sentiment and opinion,” Mr. Jackson wrote.

“It is an unusual case,” Mr. Jackson wrote, “in which his judgment should be overruled.”

Ms. Sassoon wrote that the decision to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams over her objections was not the product of the sort of sober deliberation that should warrant an exception to that general approach. She said Mr. Adams’s lawyers had urged what she characterized as a “quid pro quo” in which the mayor would support Mr. Trump’s priorities if the indictment were dismissed.

“I remain baffled,” she wrote, “by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”

Ms. Sassoon’s interpretation of Mr. Jackson’s words is the conventional one, and it is a reflection of her credentials and place in the conservative legal community. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she served as a law clerk to two leading conservative jurists, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., and Justice Antonin Scalia.

John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University who is writing a biography of Justice Jackson, said there was little doubt about how he would have viewed the Justice Department’s handling of the Adams case. “Pretty obviously he would be dismayed and appalled,” Professor Barrett said.

Mr. Bove, however, drew a different lesson from the Jackson speech in his letter accepting Ms. Sassoon’s resignation, writing that there was “great irony” in Ms. Sassoon’s invocation of the speech.

“His remarks are unquestionably relevant here, but not in the way you have suggested,” he wrote.

Mr. Bove, seeming to ignore the main theme of the speech, quoted snippets from it.

“Jackson warned that ‘some measure of centralized control’ over federal prosecutors was ‘necessary,’” he wrote.

“The senior leadership of the Justice Department exercises that control,” Mr. Bove went on. “Moreover, one of Jackson’s concerns was that ‘the most dangerous power of the prosecutor’ arises from the risk that the prosecutor would ‘pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.’”

Judge Wilkinson, who was among the judges President George W. Bush considered naming to the Supreme Court, said on Friday that Ms. Sassoon had been an exemplary law clerk.

“While I do not know the particulars in this case,” he said, “what I do know is that Danielle possesses great integrity and courage, which has always made me proud.”

In a tribute after Justice Scalia died in 2016, Ms. Sassoon wrote that his loyalty was to neutral legal principles.

“Justice Scalia was devoted to the integrity of reasoning and ideas,” Ms. Sassoon wrote. “He cared deeply about logic, process and the rules that undergirded particular outcomes — those rules would endure and be the tools used by lower courts to decide future cases.”

Ms. Sassoon added, in a passage that seemed to anticipate her resignation, that Justice Scalia “lacked the abundant caution that plagues today’s media-conscious politicians, judges and lawyers.”

In instructing Ms. Sassoon on Monday to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams, Mr. Bove invoked a different set of values, one rooted in politics and payback.

“It cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed,” Mr. Bove wrote.

In a footnote, Mr. Bove denied offering an explicit deal to Mr. Adams’s lawyer, writing that he said at a meeting last month that “the government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement.”

The footnote should be read as a warning sign, Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, wrote in a newsletter on Thursday. “The need to put in writing that dropping the prosecution was not in exchange for ‘assistance on immigration enforcement,’” he wrote, “sure seemed to strongly imply that actually … it was.”

Mr. Bove, in a sentence in some tension with Mr. Jackson’s speech, said the administration would soon turn its attention to a new target. “There is also questionable behavior reflected in certain of the prosecution team’s decisions,” he wrote, “which will be addressed in the forthcoming investigations.”

In just the last 48 hours, the top Democrat in the House, nearly every major member of the city’s elected leadership, civic leaders, pastors and even staunch mayoral allies have credibly argued that he let President Trump gain effective sway over the most important City Hall in America.

Calls for his resignation have escalated. Pressure is mounting on Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove the mayor.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, citing Mr. Trump’s “leverage over Adams,” said that if the mayor “won’t resign, he must be removed.” Representative Nydia Velázquez said Mr. Adams must step down because the city could not be “led by someone under Trump’s thumb and willing to sell out New Yorkers.”

The calls also came from Democrats at the State Capitol, including Ms. Hochul’s lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, and the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Michael Gianaris, and from the mayor’s challengers in the June primary election.

The saga over Mr. Adams’s criminal case has also set off a crisis within the Justice Department, where the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and several top officials in the department’s public integrity unit in Washington resigned on Thursday rather than obey an order from the acting deputy attorney general to drop the case against the mayor.

Diagram: How the Justice Department Resignations Unfolded

More than half a dozen government attorneys have resigned since an order by the Trump administration’s Justice Department to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.

In her resignation letter, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, accused Mr. Adams’s lawyers of negotiating for a dismissal in exchange for the mayor’s help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The mayor’s lawyers, she wrote, “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.”

The mayor’s open courtship of Mr. Trump, and his monthslong refusal to criticize him, have raised doubts over Mr. Adams’s ability to run the city independently. Many New Yorkers are worried about the president’s threats of mass deportations and funding cuts to key programs.

At the same time, many New Yorkers are concerned about an influx of 200,000 migrants from the southern border, the strain on the city of caring for them and some high-profile violent incidents involving migrants. The issue helped Mr. Trump perform better in the city in November’s election than he had four years ago and could be a central concern in the mayoral election this year and in the governor’s race next year.

Still, the mayor has done little to assuage doubts that he is beholden to Mr. Trump.

On Friday afternoon, Mr. Adams released a statement responding to the backlash, pledging to “always put this city first.”

“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,” he said. “Never.”

He urged New Yorkers to move forward and to “put this difficult episode behind us.”

Yet earlier, Mr. Adams made two public appearances on Friday with Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, one with the former talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw and the other on Fox News. He underscored the city’s collaboration on immigration enforcement, saying he was not “standing in the way.”

On “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Adams highlighted their new agreement to allow federal immigration authorities to return to the Rikers Island jail complex. Then Mr. Homan boasted that the mayor was under his influence and said that Ms. Hochul was an “embarrassment” and should resign herself.

Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who is running for mayor, said that it was the mayor who was humiliating himself.

“I’d say we’ve become a national joke with how embarrassing this is, but unfortunately none of this is funny,” he said. “The greatest city in the world is being humiliated daily because Adams is compromised.”

Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who is running for mayor, urged Ms. Hochul to take action.

“So much of Trump’s agenda would hurt New Yorkers,” she said, adding: “We like puppets on ‘Sesame Street,’ not City Hall.”

Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate who would become acting mayor if Mr. Adams were to resign or be removed, said on Friday that he wished the mayor would step aside for the good of the city.

“He cannot be the mayor of this city and govern this city the way it needs to be governed,” he said.

Ms. Hochul, who previously suggested that she would not oust Mr. Adams, mostly remained equivocal, though she did not rule out removing him.

“The allegations are extremely concerning and serious,” she said in an interview on MSNBC on Thursday night. “But I cannot, as the governor of this state, have a kneejerk, politically motivated reaction.”

The crowded field of mayoral candidates running against Mr. Adams has jumped on the mayor’s vulnerability and started to campaign more aggressively. They held a series of news conferences this week to criticize the mayor’s cooperation with the president and the Trump administration’s unilateral decision to seize $80 million in federal migrant funding from the city’s account.

Mr. Delgado’s call for Mr. Adams to resign puts him at odds with Ms. Hochul. He similarly called on President Biden not to run for re-election last year before Ms. Hochul was prepared to do so, and could be considering his own campaign for governor next year against her.

Mr. Delgado said in a statement on Friday that while Mr. Adams is innocent until proven guilty, “it is clear that he is compromised and no longer capable of making decisions in the best interests of New York City.”

For weeks, Mr. Adams had been currying favor with Mr. Trump, visiting him in Florida and attending his inauguration. The mayor hoped that having the charges dismissed could prevent an embarrassing trial in April — and the prospect of prison time — and he could return to focusing on running for re-election.

But even before the Justice Department’s actions, Mr. Adams’s popularity had plummeted in recent polls that placed him well behind the former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is considering entering the mayor’s race.

Mr. Adams sought to blunt the criticism in a flurry of television and radio interviews on Thursday night, defending his cooperation with Mr. Homan and arguing that he was not under Mr. Trump’s thumb.

“Anyone who believes I’m on a short leash needs to go back and look at my history,” he said.

Yet even Democrats in New York who have been reluctant to criticize Mr. Adams after his indictment in September have publicly expressed concern about his leadership, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Mr. Jeffries raised his strongest doubts yet about Mr. Adams on Thursday, saying that some New Yorkers in his district in Brooklyn were “deeply alarmed” and that fears over the mayor being compromised were “legitimately held concerns.”

“It is the intention of the Trump administration to keep the current mayor on a short leash,” he said at a news conference.

Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker who has warred with the mayor, said on Thursday that the Justice Department’s order was an “instrument of blackmail” intended to make Mr. Adams “an arm” of the Trump administration.

The mayor’s allies have been willing to confront him as well. When Mr. Adams said that a new charter revision commission could alter the city’s sanctuary laws, Richard Buery, the chair of the commission who was appointed by Mr. Adams, went public with his opposition. Mr. Buery said the city should “be doing everything in our power” to support the city’s 600,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom pay taxes and follow the law.

Another member of the commission, Carl Weisbrod, agreed with Mr. Buery: “I did not join to make it easier to expel law-abiding residents from the city.”

Jeffery C. Mays and Nicholas Fandos ∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂ contributed reporting.

The interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a career prosecutor named Danielle R. Sassoon who had been recently elevated by the Trump administration, refused, saying she could not do something that was contrary to the facts and the law, and that was motivated by political reasons unrelated to the case. She resigned.

Mr. Bove could have then made the same demand of other prosecutors in Ms. Sassoon’s office; instead, he redirected his efforts to career staff members at Justice Department headquarters.

There, too, people stepped down rather than carry out what they viewed as a deeply improper order. By late Thursday, five prosecutors in Washington had resigned.

As a Justice Department official, Mr. Bove could simply sign the document himself. While it would be highly unusual for someone at his level to take such a role in a criminal case, there is nothing that expressly bars him from doing so.

There are several factors that may help explain why he has not signed the document so far.

First, his boss, Ms. Bondi, issued a memo last week insisting that Justice Department lawyers should be signing legal filings, telling them that withholding their names from a legal filing they disagree with could lead to punishment or dismissal.

For decades, department practice allowed lawyers, in rare instances, to withhold their names from filings if they strongly believed they could not make a good-faith argument.

That area of legal ethics is not clear-cut — government lawyers have an obligation to carry out the work of the government whether they personally agree with a particular policy goal or not. But occasionally, a lawyer will find a particular course of action so unreasonable or likely to fail that they will back out of the case.

Ms. Bondi’s memo said that would no longer be tolerated.

“When Department of Justice attorneys, for example, refuse to advance good-faith arguments by declining to appear in court or sign briefs, it undermines the constitutional order and deprives the president of the benefit of his lawyers,” Ms. Bondi wrote. “It is therefore the policy of the Department of Justice that any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination, consistent with applicable law.”

The memo serves as a reminder of the priorities Ms. Bondi is seeking to operate under, in which Justice Department lawyers do not question or challenge top-level directives.

Mr. Bove may also be loath to sign the document himself because of the extra scrutiny it would entail. The judge overseeing the Adams case, Dale Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, may well demand answers of whomever submits such a document. Indeed, Ms. Sassoon’s refusal letter pointedly suggests the judge may hold a hearing to ask tough questions of the Justice Department if it seeks to withdraw the charges.

Senior Justice Department officials like Mr. Bove generally try to avoid going to court to face a grilling from a judge.

The longer this standoff between Mr. Bove and career employees at the department continues, the harder it may be for Mr. Bove to avoid such questioning from Judge Ho, particularly given the public airing of the dispute between Mr. Bove and Ms. Sassoon.

Ultimately, it will be up to the judge to decide whether to dismiss the charges, but it is very difficult for a criminal case to proceed once the prosecuting office has abandoned it.

Given the controversy, there is now far more at stake for the Justice Department and its leadership than just the outcome of the Adams case. Mr. Bove and others may find that even if they get the charges dismissed, they may face intense public scrutiny over their actions and motives.

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.”

Mr. Scotten was responding to a Justice Department official’s directive this week to dismiss the bribery, fraud and other charges against Mr. Adams so the mayor could help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Read the Resignation Letter From Hagan Scotten

Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney, wrote to Emil Bove, acting deputy attorney general, refusing to drop the case against Mayor Eric Adams.

Read Document

The official, Emil Bove III, who is the acting deputy attorney general, gave the order to Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. She resigned on Thursday rather than carry out the order to seek dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

Ms. Sassoon, 38, a veteran Southern District prosecutor, was elevated last month by the Trump administration to lead the office. At the time, she and Mr. Scotten were co-chiefs of the office’s criminal appeals unit.

Mr. Scotten did not immediately return an email requesting comment. A Southern District spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Scotten’s resignation.

Diagram: How the Justice Department Resignations Unfolded

More than half a dozen government attorneys have resigned since an order by the Trump administration’s Justice Department to drop charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.

Mr. Scotten served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and earned two Bronze Stars. He graduated from Harvard Law School and clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court, and for Brett M. Kavanaugh before he, too, became an Supreme Court justice.

Mr. Scotten had led the investigation into Mr. Adams since it began in the summer of 2021. It resulted in an indictment that was announced in September by a previous U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In a hearing in October, Mr. Scotten said in court that additional charges could be brought and additional defendants charged.

Ms. Sassoon, in a letter on Thursday, noted that the Southern District was prepared to seek a new indictment that would add an obstruction count based on evidence the mayor destroyed and told others to destroy evidence and to lie to the F.B.I. She said such an indictment would also include new campaign finance accusations.

A lawyer for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, responded to the threat of new accusations, saying that if federal prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

In his four-paragraph letter, Mr. Scotten expressed disdain for Mr. Bove’s rationale for dismissing the case.

“The first justification for the motion — that Damian Williams’s role in the case somehow tainted a valid indictment supported by ample evidence, and pursued under four different U.S. attorneys — is so weak as to be transparently pretextual.”

The second justification, he wrote, was worse: “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.”