So much for getting politics out of law enforcement.

P oliticized law enforcement is always wrong. And it is not more attractive when it insulates a politician from what appears to be righteous law enforcement than when it targets a politician with what appears to be discriminatory law enforcement. That is the lesson of the Trump Justice Department’s dropping of the corruption case against New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.

I was not blown away by the case against Mayor Adams brought by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). But that’s mainly because Adams appears to be a bumbling small-timer — an often incoherent loose cannon previously notorious for praising Louis Farrakhan and chumming around with Al Sharpton. The 57-page, five-count indictment, which exposes Adams to a statutory maximum 45 years’ of imprisonment, is a story of penny-ante bribery and illegal foreign campaign contributions — stemming mostly from Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president, which marked the start of his courtship with the abominable Erdoğan regime in Turkey.

You always have to see how a case plays out in court, but the SDNY (where I served as a prosecutor for nearly 20 years) has an enviable record in political corruption cases. And it’s a bipartisan record: SDNY prosecutors have pursued cases against members of both parties, regardless of which party held the White House. Just ask Bob Menendez, a prominent New Jersey Democrat and crook, recently sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment after being prosecuted by the Biden-era SDNY, after barely eking out a hung jury to avoid conviction when he was prosecuted by the Obama-era SDNY.

Menendez, naturally, is now campaigning for the Adams treatment — or is it the Blagojevich treatment? The former senator is suddenly flattering the president for his wisdom about politicized prosecutions, which is how Menendez would have you see the SDNY’s case, on which the jury found him guilty of all 16 felony counts. Funny thing about that: It’s not how Trump himself has seen the SDNY. To the contrary, throughout his prosecution by Manhattan’s elected-progressive Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg, Trump touted the SDNY and its reputation: reminding one and all that the very top federal prosecutors had investigated the same conduct Bragg charged but concluded there was no case against him for violating campaign finance laws.

Now, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi, acting through acting deputy AG Emil Bove, is poised to abandon the case against Adams on explicitly political grounds — which are hilariously claimed to be part of the new DOJ’s crusade against politicized prosecutorial decision making. In the memo directing that the Adams case be dismissed, Bove theorizes that Adams was indicted because he “criticized the [Biden] Administration’s immigration policies.” In taking pains to lay this off on the SDNY’s former Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, Bove insists that Main Justice is “in no way call[ing] into question the integrity and efforts of the line prosecutor responsible for the case,” or those of the SDNY’s interim U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon.

This is ridiculous. Bove concedes that Main Justice has not “assess[ed] the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which it is based.” It is thus impossible for Bondi and Bove to have made a responsible evaluation of whether the case is a political vendetta, or to have concluded that Adams was “targeted” as the memo asserts. Meantime, interim U.S. attorney Sassoon and the line prosecutors recently submitted a letter to trial court (Judge Dale Ho) in which they compellingly dismantled Adams’s claims that the Biden administration, acting through Williams, targeted Adams because the mayor complained about the Biden border collapse that flooded New York City with illegal aliens. As the SDNY prosecutors detail, the Adams investigation “began more than a year earlier, based on concrete evidence that Adams had accepted illegal campaign contributions.” As if it were not obvious enough that the career prosecutors determined Adams’s corruption ran deep, we must remember that scandal has fully engulfed the mayor’s administration, with numerous officials and cronies caught in the web.

In other words, Biden is gone and Williams is gone, yet the prosecutors, whose integrity and efforts Bove says are beyond reproach — i.e., the prosecutors from the SDNY office whose analysis of his own case President Trump has repeatedly held up as a model — have examined Adams’s allegations against the factual record and the evidence and found them to be baseless.

Despite that, the Trump administration, led by its new AG, is dropping the case based on its political calculations. These include a rationalization that the prosecution — which was headed for trial in April — was interfering with “Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the [Biden] administration.” Put aside that this is just political messaging masquerading as Justice Department legal deliberations. The claim is laughable. It has been refuted by Adams himself, who insists that his lawyers have focused on the case while he has focused on governing the city.

Dismissing the case may not be as easy as it seems.

First, if past is prologue, Main Justice should brace for some pushback from the SDNY. Bondi and Bove directed Sassoon “to dismiss the pending charges . . . as soon as is practicable[.]” Hence, the interim U.S. attorney must be willing to make the dismissal motion — meaning, direct one of the prosecutors who has spent years working on the case to make the dismissal motion. The rule of the road in the executive branch is that you must either follow a superior’s order or, if you determine you cannot follow the order in good conscience, resign. We’ll see what happens on that front.

Second, as we’ve seen in other cases (most notably, the effort by the Justice Department in Trump I to dismiss the Michael Flynn case), the applicable federal rule (Rule 48(a)) requires the government to obtain “leave of court” to dismiss an indictment. Judge Ho, an uber progressive Biden-appointee, probably will not be a pushover in that regard — even though, as a matter of law, the judge’s role in a dismissal motion is ministerial. (The decision whether to bring or persist in prosecuting criminal charges is a plenary executive call; the judiciary has no power to compel the DOJ to proceed with a case that the DOJ has decided to abandon.) I would expect Judge Ho to direct the prosecutors to make a submission that outlines the supposed weaknesses in the Adams case that justify dismissing it — which will put the Justice Department to the no-win choice of attacking its own case, publicly acknowledging that the dismissal is politically motivated, or defying the judge by refusing to explain itself.

Finally, the Bove memo conditions the government’s making the dismissal motion on Adams’s agreement that the dismissal is “without prejudice.” That is, the Trump DOJ is reserving the right to indict Adams again on the same charges at some later time. The spin here is that Bondi wants to give Trump’s SDNY U.S. attorney nominee, former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a chance to evaluate the case once he takes over. That’s not very convincing since the case is not complicated, and Sassoon — a former clerk to Justice Scalia who successfully prosecuted the more complex Sam Bankman-Fried financial fraud case — already evaluated it and argued to Judge Ho that Adams’s selective prosecution claims were meritless.

So why dismiss without prejudice? Democrats will say, of course, that a politicized DOJ is doing this so Trump can maintain leverage over Adams, inducing the mayor to support the president and the Trump immigration enforcement policies. Given that the DOJ is making a political call here, and that it expressly did so by stressing the need to have Adams cooperate with Trump’s enforcement agenda, the Democrats’ contention is going to get traction — and that’s not going to help Adams in the forthcoming mayoral election in the Big Blue Apple. (To be sure, getting tried and convicted wouldn’t have helped him, either.)

If Trump’s top DOJ officials have convinced themselves that this is how to get politics out of law enforcement, I believe they need to rethink the concept.