Adviser says judge should end New York City Mayor Eric Adams's bribery case, court filing shows

The public corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams should be dismissed permanently, a special adviser assigned by the presiding judge to oversee the matter concluded on Friday.

U.S. District Court Judge Dale Ho, who oversees the Adams case, took an extraordinary step last month of delaying his decision whether to drop the case and appointed well-respected Republican lawyer Paul Clement, a former solicitor general under former President George W. Bush, to address the scope of judicial authority.

Clement recommended that the judge dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning charges cannot be refiled at a later date, to remove any leverage federal prosecutors could exert over the mayor in the future.

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a prepared statement Friday evening, Alex Spiro and William Burck, attorneys for Adams, said, "We have said all along this was a political hit job masquerading as a prosecution." 

Ho asked the parties to return to court on March 14 for a hearing on the issue.

Former prosecutors overseeing the case had accused the Department of Justice of coercing the mayor to crack down on undocumented migrants in New York City in exchange for ending the criminal prosecution.

"A dismissal without prejudice creates a palpable sense that the prosecution outlined in the indictment and approved by a grand jury could be renewed, a prospect that hangs like the proverbial Sword of Damocles over the accused," Clement wrote in his 33-page brief. "Such an ongoing prospect of reindictment is particularly problematic when it comes to the sensitive task of prosecuting public officials. There is an inherent risk that once an indictment has been procured, the prospect of reindictment could create the appearance, if not the reality, that the actions of a public official are being driven by concerns about staying in the good graces of the federal executive, rather than the best interests of his constituents."

That was not just an appearance, according to former interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned from her post rather than comply with a Justice Department order to drop the case.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who represented President Donald Trump in his hush-money trial last year, directed Sassoon to end the case in February. In a letter to the prosecutor, Bove informed Sassoon that he had not reviewed the merits of the case, but directed that Adams must be freed of the charges in order to carry out the president’s crackdown on migrants in New York.

In her resignation letter, Sassoon detailed a meeting at Justice Department headquarters in which Adam’s lawyer Alex Spiro horse-traded over dropping the case.

"Adams's attorneys 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," Sassoon wrote.

Lead Manhattan prosecutor in the Adams’ case, Hagan Scotten, also resigned — along with five other Department of Justice lawyers connected to the case — for the same reasons.

"I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal," he wrote in a letter to Bove. "But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way."

On Friday, two more Manhattan prosecutors, Celia Cohen and Andrew Rohrbach involved in the Adams case were placed on leave and escorted out of the U.S. Attorney’s office, according to several news reports.

Despite these serious allegations, the federal guidelines of criminal procedure regarding the dismissal of criminal charges, called Rule 48(a), by a prosecutor do not permit the judge to investigate possibly unethical reasons for ending a criminal case, Clement concluded.

"In short, Rule 48(a) gives the court an important, but limited, role, principally focused on how — not whether — a prosecution should be dismissed," the adviser wrote in court papers.

If the judge dismisses the case, Adams still remains under a cloud of scandal that will severely hobble his chances of winning reelection this year.

Federal prosecutors unsealed a five-count indictment against Adams last September, accusing him of soliciting more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from foreign nationals from Turkey. The mayor used straw donors to make the money appear to come from legitimate contributors and then fraudulently received more than $10 million in public matching funds through the city’s campaign finance system, according to court papers. Since 2015, Adams received free or steeply discounted first-class airfare from Turkish business people and a public official, prosecutors charged, and in return he helped the country’s government bypass municipal fire safety regulations to open a new high-rise consulate in Midtown.

The mayor pleaded not guilty to all the charges and said that he believes that the charges were politically motivated because of his criticism of the Biden administration’s border security and migrant policy.

Trump, before his election and afterward, said that he sympathized with Adams and considered pardoning him.

Instead, Bove ordered the interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to drop the case — without prejudice — because it interfered with Adams’ ability to carry out Trump’s more restrictive border policy and distracted the mayor from fighting crime in the city. In a letter to Sassoon, Bove admitted that he had not reviewed the case on the merits of the evidence, but questioned whether the former U.S. Attorney Damian Williams had brought the case to raise his political profile with an eye toward elected office.

Sassoon refused Bove’s order to move for dismissal, resigning instead, but not before accusing the former Trump defense attorney of making an unethical horse-trade with the mayor.

The knotty political and legal issue recalls the case against former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from the first Trump administration.

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about talks he had with the Russian ambassador. The Justice Department moved to dismiss his charges after the pleading. Washington, D.C., District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan instead drafted John Gleeson, former Brooklyn federal court judge, to review the effort to drop the case. Gleeson, who was also a former federal mob prosecutor, responded with a 82-page brief in which he called the motion to dismiss showed "clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power."

Sullivan never got the opportunity to respond to Gleeson’s brief because Trump pardoned Flynn, rendering the entire exercise moot.

Steven Harfenist, a Lake Success lawyer who submitted court papers in the Adams case on behalf of Flynn, said Ho had no authority to "second-guess both the Department of Justice and the defendant on the issue of dismissal."

Harfenist said the judge was trying to "create a controversy that the court could resolve."

Although the question over Adams alleged solicitation of foreign donations and attempts to defraud the city’s campaign finance system remain unresolved by ending the case, Clement concluded that "Dismissal with prejudice ... promotes another important separation-of-powers virtue — namely, accountability."