Earlier quoted context omitted.
You interpret this as an ultimatum, I see offering them a way out as being nice. At the same time one has to assert seeing through obvious b-s. What is appropriate gets decided by lawmakers not judges. Once judges willfully violate the code they have stepped outside their assigned role. This quickly became more of a political problem than a legal one, and what is right is ultimately for voters to decide. Whether I am…
You can try to wordsmith and twist the logic all you want. Telling someone “resign and do what I want, or else” is an ultimatum and bordering on blackmail. It is an ultimatum that is directly counter to your stated goal as well, which to “allow the voters to decide”. That’s you deciding for them.
Imagine you work as a prosecutor. Someone submits fairly strong, and actionable evidence, that your wife has commited a crime your office is required to prosecute. You are legally compelled to excuse yourself, and let someone prosecute, preferably someone not independent of you. If you do, you know your wife will go to prison, and in the process of the procecution, your every dirty secret will be exposed, and even if you are entirely righteous, and was entierly unaware, and willing to believe the worst of your wife, your reputation will be in tatters. Its also possible that you know that the other prosecutor wont prosecute, but instead attempt to blackmail you, or your wife, using the evidence.
You now have a nasty choice.
Lets say you chose to hand the evidence over to a righteous collegue. Your reputation will be damaged regardless, but if you resign the damage will be light, and as you are no longer with the prosecutors office, you are not expected to approve requests for eg your personal banking information by default. Making it much easier to hide any missdeeds. But if you keep working, everyone who wants your job will spread the information, and your opponents in court will bring it up repeatedly. Both with insentive to lie, or exaggerate. Further, prosecutors are often required, or at least expected, to cooperate with legal investigations in ways regular people are not.
Lets say you chose to hand the evidence to a non-righeous collegue. Your reputation is intact, but he will keep requesting favors, it looks better, but there are no guarantees it goes away.
You can also immideately resign, knowing that it will take a year or two for a replacement to get up to speed, and all you need to do is put the specific case on the bottom of the priority pile, pretend you never read it, and techically have commited no crime, while getting years to prepare, stuff to get lost, or just jump countries.
Or you can chose dismiss it for lack of evidence, toss the evidence in the bin, and pretend like it never happened. Its a boring procedural thing anyways, and odds are good it was just someone temporarily pissed off, who wont care. After all, they didnt even know they submitted it to your office, what idiot does that...
Its not blackmail. Its just that resigning is the better option for you.