Senior members of the Department of Justice are reportedly in talks about potentially abandoning the sweeping public corruption case against Mayor Adams — a move that would fly in the face of the long-held independence of the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.
In the most recent development, ABC reported Friday that DOJ officials met with the mayor’s legal team and prosecutors from the Southern District of New York in Washington D.C. to discuss the future of the case.
While Trump has floated the possibility of pardoning the mayor, an outright dismissal would be at odds with representations in recent months by the four veteran public corruption prosecutors trying the case — including disclosures that more criminal charges against the mayor could soon be coming down the pike. Such a move would appear to be motivated plainly by politics.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the DOJ and prosecutors from the Southern District were in talks about the possibility of dropping Adams’ case. The Times said Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, had dangled the possibility of the mayor cooperating with Trump’s hardline immigration policies in New York in exchange for the DOJ getting rid of the case.
Spiro, who also has represented Trump ally Elon Musk, denied the claim.
““That is a complete lie,” he told the Times.
In any event, Washington’s intervention in a case after criminal charges have already been filed —absent new developments — would be highly unusual, as the Daily News has previously reported. Defendants can ask DOJ headquarters to overrule a U.S. attorney, but they are generally unlikely to prevail absent extraordinary circumstances.
What is unclear at this point is how Trump, who has quickly moved to assert and expand executive power since taking office, will figure into the mix.
The mayor has come under fire for what many Democrats see as an overly cozy relationship with Trump. Adams has, like Trump, said he is a victim of a weaponized justice system, claiming the feds went after him because he criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant crisis. The feds have noted they began investigating him months before he became mayor.
Any order to drop the charges from Washington would likely be directed at acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who reportedly attended Friday’s meeting with Spiro.
Sassoon’s support of the case against the mayor was made clear in a filing earlier this month that pushed back against Adams’ claims that the prosecution against him was politically motivated based on an op-ed in City & State by former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams about corruption in New York.
“Adams’s latest filing should be viewed in light of his shifting attempts to suggest that he was indicted for any reason other than his crimes,” the filing read. “Adams’s latest, self-publicized argument is simply an attempt to shift the focus away from the evidence of his guilt.”
If Sassoon refused to dismiss the case, she could be fired or may choose to resign. The line prosecutors would similarly have few means of pushing back absent resigning in protest. In that case, the least disruptive path could be the DOJ sending someone from D.C. to New York to file a motion to dismiss over objections from SDNY.
Judge Dale Ho, presiding over the case, could demand a hearing to smoke out Sassoon and the prosecution team’s feelings on the matter, but it’s unclear what would happen if he refused to rubber-stamp a dismissal. If he did, Adams would likely appeal.
Should federal charges against Adams be dismissed, the Manhattan district attorney’s office could theoretically pursue a case, as it did when Trump pardoned right-wing strategist Steve Bannon of federal fraud charges just before leaving office in 2020.
But it’s doubtful Trump’s DOJ would facilitate a handover of evidence to DA Alvin Bragg’s office, who secured his conviction for falsifying business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case right before he took office. The current top official at the DOJ, acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove, represented him in the case. A Bragg spokeswoman declined to comment Friday.
Adams has pleaded not guilty to wire fraud, bribery, and related charges collectively carrying up to 45 years in prison. Jury selection in the trial is set to begin April 21 — just two months before the mayoral primary.
The five-count indictment filed in September accuses Adams of taking bribes and soliciting illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals in exchange for abusing his position as New York City’s highest-ranking official and before that as Brooklyn borough president.
The feds allege that he began accepting thousands of dollars worth of benefits in 2014, much of it in the form of luxury travel, from wealthy foreign nationals who sought to one day cash in on their relationship. They say he partly repaid debts to his benefactors by pressuring the FDNY to open a Midtown skyscraper housing Turkey’s consulate before it was safe to do so in the months before his election.
In October, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten told the court it was “quite likely” Adams would face more charges before his trial, and earlier this month, prosecutors told the court they had uncovered more criminal conduct. On Jan. 10, a Brooklyn real estate magnate with ties to the Turkish government copped to organizing illegal donations toward his 2021 mayoral campaign in a plea deal believed to require his cooperation.
Erden Arkan admitted to plotting to funnel foreign donations through workers at his construction company KSK, which were multiplied by eight with taxpayers’ money through the city’s public matching funds program, at an April 2021 dinner with Adams and Reyhan Ozgur, Turkey’s consul general in New York.
Spiro has said Arkan’s guilty plea would have no bearing on the case against the mayor.
Spiro did not respond to the Daily News’s inquiries. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. A representative for Trump did not return calls from The News.