The judge overseeing the corruption case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams appointed conservative lawyer Paul Clement to argue against the agreement between the Department of Justice and Adams to dismiss the charges, according to a filing submitted on Friday.
The decision to appoint Clement as an outside counsel comes as District Court Judge Dale Ho wrestles with what to do over the controversial decision by the Justice Department to dismiss corruption charges against Adams. The dismissal has been marred by allegations that it is a quid pro quo arrangement for Adams to help implement the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy in the nation’s largest city.
Those allegations stem from the resignation letter of acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, a Donald Trump appointee and former clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Sassoon alleged that Adams’ lawyers proposed he would work with the Trump administration on its mass deportation policy in exchange for dropping the charges. The Justice Department and Adams’ lawyers deny this.
Ho is limited in how he can rule when prosecutors seek to drop charges. He is bringing Clement into the case to argue against the joint opinion of the Justice Department and Adams that the case should be dismissed without prejudice, which would allow prosecutors to bring the charges back at any time.
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“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-making through our system of adversarial testing, which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in cases of great public importance,” Ho wrote in a brief on Friday, adding, “there has been no adversarial testing of the Government’s position generally or the form of its requested relief specifically.”
Clement, a star in conservative legal circles who previously served as solicitor general from 2004-2008 and was named as a possible Supreme Court pick by Trump in 2016, will now provide that adversarial argument against the government and mayor. He is tasked with arguing whether Ho has any power to deny the dismissal of the charges or to alter the agreement to require the government drop the charges with prejudice, so that they would not hang over Adams’ head for the foreseeable future.