Mayor Adams on Wednesday filed a motion to get his public corruption case permanently dismissed, trying a different route as a judge considers a highly controversial motion from the Department of Justice to throw it out so he can aid the Trump administration’s hardline deportation agenda.
In a new motion, Adams’ attorney Alex Spiro alleged that “the government’s conduct has destroyed whatever presumption of innocence Mayor Adams had left,” referring to disclosures by former interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned instead of following orders from the DOJ to abandon the prosecution.
Before quitting, Sassoon told U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in an internal letter that Adams should face more charges for attempting to cover up his crimes from the FBI. She alleged the deal between Adams and the Trump administration amounted to a “quid pro quo” that would wipe his slate clean in exchange for giving Trump free rein to carry out deportations in the nation’s largest sanctuary city.
The feds maintained the right to revisit the case “without prejudice” after this year’s mayoral election, sparking concerns Adams would be beholden to Trump’s deportation agenda.
One of the lead prosecutors handling the case who resigned shortly after Sassoon, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, in his resignation letter, said the DOJ would need to find another “fool” or “coward” to ask the court to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it could be brought again.
Spiro called the allegations “wildly inflammatory and false” and said the widely-reported correspondence had “turbocharged the prejudice to Mayor Adams.”
“Simply put, the government’s conduct has destroyed whatever presumption of innocence Mayor Adams had left,” he wrote Wednesday.
“The most appropriate recourse is to dismiss this case now and do so with prejudice. That is true based on this latest leak alone and independent of the fact that the government itself wants nothing to do with these meritless charges and has moved to dismiss them.”
Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho on Friday appointed an independent attorney to prepare adversarial arguments in the matter and to research what would happen if he refused the dismissal request, which was filed by Trump’s acting No. 2 at the DOJ Emil Bove after Sassoon and Scotten quit.
The motion said it was not based on Adams’ innocence or guilt but a need for him to aid the president’s crackdown on undocumented immigration unimpeded, among other reasons those who resigned called baseless. The prospect of the case going away temporarily while Adams, in effect, hands Trump the keys to the city has led to calls for the mayor’s removal from office and allegations he’s sacrificing the city’s immigrant communities to save his own skin.
In the political fallout, four of his deputy mayors have resigned, and Gov. Hochul, facing pressure to remove him, announced new “ethics guardrails” that would curtail his powers and ramp up oversight of his office.
Adams, 64, has pleaded not guilty to five counts carrying up to 45 years in prison, alleging he traded his political influence to wealthy foreign businessmen in or with ties to the Turkish government for some 10 years.
The indictment further accuses him of soliciting and accepting illegal campaign donations from his benefactors, starting around 2018, when he decided to run for mayor. The case alleged that those donations were funneled through U.S. citizens to mask their origins and maximized with taxpayer dollars through the city’s public matching funds program.
Adams allegedly repaid his debts by pulling strings for his benefactors, including meddling in a Manhattan skyscraper’s fire safety regulations to appease Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The News reached out to Spiro, Adams, Sassoon, Scotten and Bove for comment.
This story will be updated.