Judge drops criminal case against Adams

Mayor Eric Adams speaks from Gracie Mansion hours after a federal judge decided to drop the criminal case against him. Photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

By Jacob Kaye

A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed the criminal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, putting to an end the legal saga that threw City Hall into crisis for the better part of the last half year.

In a long anticipated decision, Judge Dale E. Ho allowed for the five-count indictment brought against Adams last year to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the charges can’t be brought against the mayor in the future.

The decision marks a major win for Adams, whose support among voters, donors and political allies took a nosedive after federal prosecutors first alleged that he did favors for Turkish officials in exchange for illegal donations to his campaign and flight upgrades.

The decision also comes as a partial win for the Justice Department, which first sought to have the case against Adams dismissed in February. But while the Justice Department hoped to have the charges dropped without prejudice, Ho said the only way avoid the “perception that the mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the [Trump] administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents” would be to dismiss the case for good.

Ho said that beyond granting the dismissal, he saw few valid arguments in the DOJ’s motion to dismiss, a controversial motion that led to the resignations of half a dozen federal prosecutors. In fact, the judge said that there were “many reasons to be troubled by DOJ’s proffered rationales” for dropping the case.

The most compelling reason for Ho to drop the charges was that there no longer was a prosecutor willing to pursue the charges against Adams, the judge said.

“A court cannot force the Department of Justice to prosecute a defendant,” he wrote in his decision.

“Some will undoubtedly find today’s decision unsatisfying, wondering why, if DOJ’s ostensible reasons for dropping this case are so troubling, the court does not simply deny the motion to dismiss altogether,” Ho added. “But…the court cannot order DOJ to continue the prosecution, and it is aware of no authority (outside of the criminal contempt context) that would empower it, as some have urged, to appoint an independent prosecutor…Therefore, any decision by this court to deny the government’s motion to dismiss would be futile at best.”

Despite Ho noting at the outset of his decision that his verdict was “not about whether Mayor Adams is innocent or guilty,” the mayor took to a podium outside Gracie Mansion on Wednesday to claim that he had been vindicated.

“As I said all along, this case should have never been brought and I did nothing wrong,” the mayor said. “Today we turn the page. We move forward together.”

While Adams will no longer have the threat of prison time hanging over his head, the legal saga may very well permanently taint the mayor’s future.

In the time since the charges were first brought against him, Adams has seen nearly a dozen Democrats line up to challenge him for his office in the upcoming mayoral election. The case also appeared to have made it difficult for Adams to run a traditional campaign – the mayor has done very little fundraising and has yet to fully staff a campaign team.

While the charges themselves brought a hit to Adams’ reputation, his standing in New York City saw another setback in February following the DOJ’s efforts to dismiss the case.

After then-acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove asked then-acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon to drop the charges her office had fought to bring, the young Republican prosecutor said that she’d rather resign than follow through on the order.

In a February letter to Bove, Sassoon alleged that Adams and his attorneys had entered into a quid pro quo with the Trump administration and Justice Department by promising to allow President Donald Trump to enforce his immigration agenda in New York City in exchange for the case’s dismissal.

In the wake of the letter, the mayor’s opponents and allies alike said that they were concerned that the DOJ’s effort to temporarily free Adams of the charges would leave the mayor beholden to Trump’s demands.

Though Adams has long denied that he struck any agreement with the DOJ, Ho said in his Wednesday ruling that “everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”

The judge said that the evidence of an agreement appeared to be clear. Days after the effort to dismiss the case began, Adams went on national television alongside Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and said that he would break with city law and allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to operate on Rikers Island.

Ho tore into the DOJ’s efforts to argue in their motion to dismiss that the case was preventing Adams from carrying out immigration enforcement.

“The record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts,” Ho said. “Instead, it shows that after DOJ decided to seek dismissal of his case, the mayor took at least one new immigration-related action consistent with the preferences of the new administration.”

The judge said that the argument also appeared to set a dangerous precedent regarding presidential power.

“The unprecedented nature of DOJ’s rationale is particularly concerning given its view that

its decision is ‘virtually unreviewable’ because it ‘invocates concerns about executive power that

go right to the core of Article II of the Constitution,’” Ho said. “If that is correct, DOJ’s position has rather broad implications, to put it mildly. For instance, DOJ endorsed the view that the government can apply this rationale to virtually any public official with immigration-related responsibilities — ranging from a local police commissioner to the governor of a border state — and determine that they are essentially immune from criminal liability.”

The judge also said that in contrast to both claims made by the DOJ and Adams, prosecutors operating while former President Joe Biden was in office “followed all appropriate Justice Department guidelines” when bringing the criminal charges against Adams.

Since being charged, the mayor has claimed that the Justice Department pursued the case against him because he had been critical of Biden’s handling of the migrant crisis, even though the investigation into Adams began while he was still Brooklyn borough president and before the crisis began.

“There is no evidence —zero— that they had any improper motives,” Ho said of the former prosecutors.

Despite the judge’s ruling, Adams again alleged that he was personally targeted by Biden’s DOJ on Wednesday. Toward the end of his remarks, Adams pulled out a copy of “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy,” a book written by now-FBI Director Kash Patel. The book claims that a “deep state” of government bureaucrats has taken control of the federal government and used it to terrorize Americans and dismantle democracy.

“New Yorkers stop me all the time trying to find the rationale behind [the criminal charges],” Adams said. “And I found it in this book.”

While holding up a copy of the book, Adams said that he was encouraging “every New Yorker to read it.”

“Read it and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American,” he said.