How the Justice Dept. Helped Sink Its Own Case Against Eric Adams
How the Justice Dept. Helped Sink Its Own Case Against Eric Adams A top Trump appointee guided Mr. Adams’s legal team as they crafted an argument for dismissing corruption charges against the mayor of America’s largest city.
The acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York resigned rather than follow an order to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.Credit…Dave Sanders for President Trump had just taken office when lawyers for Mayor Eric Adams of New York went to the White House with an extraordinary request: They formally asked in a letter that the new president pardon the mayor in a federal corruption case that had yet to go to trial.
Just a week later, one of Mr. Trump’s top political appointees at the Justice Department called Mr. Adams’s lawyer, saying he wanted to talk about potentially dismissing the case. What followed was a rapid series of exchanges between the lawyers and Mr. Trump’s administration that exploded this week into a confrontation between top Justice Department officials in Washington and New York prosecutors.
On Monday, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department sent a memo ordering prosecutors to dismiss the charges against the mayor. By Thursday, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest over what she described as a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and the mayor of New York City. Five officials overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in Washington stepped down soon after.
The conflagration originated in the back-and-forth between Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Alex Spiro and William A. Burck, and the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, exchanges which have not been previously reported.
The series of events — in which the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department seemed to guide criminal defense lawyers toward a rationale for dropping charges against a high-profile client — represents an extraordinary shattering of norms for an agency charged with enforcing the laws of the United States.
It also sends a message that, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department will make prosecutorial decisions based not on the merits of a case but on purely political concerns, longtime prosecutors and defense lawyers said.
Prompted by Mr. Bove, the mayor’s lawyers refined their approach until they landed on a highly unorthodox argument, records and interviews show — one that was ultimately reflected in on Monday. That memo stated that the criminal case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability” to address illegal immigration and violent crime. It also pointedly said that the decision had nothing to do with the evidence or the law.
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This account of what led to Mr. Bove’s memo and the internal resistance with which it was met is based on interviews with five people with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as documents related to the case against Mr. Adams.
There remain several unanswered questions about the lead-up to the extraordinary decision, including how many times Mr. Spiro and Mr. Bove interacted.
But the sudden push to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams came even as Manhattan prosecutors were preparing to move forward with more charges against him.