By David Thomas

June 2(Reuters) - Hagan Scotten, a former U.S. prosecutor who resigned after the Justice Department ordered its lawyers to drop a criminal corruption case against Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams, has joined Hueston Hennigan as a partner, the firm said Monday.

Scotten was one of several career prosecutors who resigned in February after then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan to dismiss the case against Adams.

Bove had asserted in a memo to the office that the case was impeding Adams' ability to aid President Donald Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

Scotten, one of the lead prosecutors in the Adams case, told Bove in his resignation letter there was no valid reason to justify dismissing the charges and that he would never comply with the order to do so.

"From my perspective, what they were asking me to do, I simply could not do as an officer of the court," Scotten said in an interview.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A U.S. judge dismissed the corruption charges against Adams in April, even as he said the Trump administration's argument that the charges were hindering Adams' help with an immigration crackdown "smacks of a bargain."

Reuters reported in April that all five of the Manhattan-based U.S. prosecutors who were originally involved in the Adams case, including former Acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest, along with at least six career attorneys in Washington who were also pressured to drop the case.

Before serving as a federal prosecutor, Scotten was a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and for Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a fellow conservative, when Kavanaugh was at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Scotten also helped prosecute Charles McGonigal, the former leader of the FBI's counterintelligence division in New York who pleaded guilty to working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the United States. McGonigal was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2023.

He also prosecuted Lev Parnas, a onetime associate of Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Parnas was found guilty in October 2021 of violating U.S. campaign finance laws during the 2018 elections.

Scotten said he chose to join the Hueston Hennigan firm after determining it "is the kind of firm that never backs away from a fight."

The firm has handled high-profile disputes for clients including Amazon and Boeing. In March, it successfully defended Disney in a copyright dispute over its hit film "Moana."

(Reporting by David Thomas)