Federal prosecutors moved to toss the historic corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams Friday following a wave of resignations in protest of the Justice Department’s orders for the case to be killed.
The motion to dismiss the case without prejudice marks the first formal step to halting Adams’ criminal prosecution — and leaves the future of the case in the hands of a Biden-appointed federal judge.
It came days after the stunning directive by the DOJ that Manhattan federal prosecutors should drop the case because it was “politicized” and impacting Adams’ ability to lead the city and to help enact President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who signed Friday’s motion, ordered the Southern District of New York Monday to toss the case and admonished the prosecutors’ “factual and legal theories” as “extremely aggressive.”
He also railed that the Adams prosecution was politically motivated retribution for him speaking against the Biden administration’s border policies and claimed the case threatened Adams’ ability to help carry out Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants since his security clearance had been revoked with the looming prosecution.
The bombshell order put prosecutors in the famously independent Southern District on a collision course with the newly installed Trump DOJ over the past week.
Acting Manhattan US Attorney Danielle Sassoon refused to obey the demand, instead sending a scathing resignation letter accusing Adams of agreeing to acquiesce to Trump’s immigration plans as part of a “quid pro quo” deal to get his case dropped.
“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” added Sassoon, a Republican.
Sassoon also revealed in the letter that Manhattan feds were prepared to bring a new bombshell indictment charging Adams with destroying evidence and telling people to lie to the FBI.
She had previously shot down Adams’ claims that he was indicted for “any reason other than his crimes.”
“That claim disintegrated when discovery made clear that the investigation into Adams began more than a year earlier, based on concrete evidence that Adams had accepted illegal campaign contributions,” a recent filing hinting at further charges against the mayor that Sassoon signed read.
Hagan Scotten — an assistant US attorney and the lead prosecutor on the case — resigned as well on Friday. In his own letter, he wrote that only a “fool” or “coward” would comply with the DOJ order, which keeps Hizzoner beholden to President Trump because of the possibility of reviving the case after November’s mayoral election.
“Any assistant US 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,” Scotten fumed.
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” he added.
Five prosecutors in the DOJ’s public integrity section resigned as well when ordered by their Trump-appointed bosses to write up a motion asking a judge to toss the case, the Associated Press reported.
On Friday, Bove finally got a prosecutor in Washington D.C. to agree to file the motion after threatening to fire all of the department’s public integrity prosecutors if one of them did not comply, Reuters reported.
Edward Sullivan, the senior litigation counsel for the DOJ’s public integrity section, and Antoinette Bacon, supervisory official for the criminal division, filed the motion but did not sign it, though Bove did.
No prosecutors from the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office appeared to contribute to the filing, which noted that DC DOJ staff would handle the matter moving forward.
The SDNY’s reputation for autonomy from the political winds in Washington, DC, is so ingrained that it’s known as the “Sovereign District.”
The district’s prosecutors marshaled the probe into Adams’ allegedly taking bribes from Turkish nationals and flouting campaign finance laws starting in 2021. They accused him of pressuring the FDNY to fast track inspections on the Turkish House, a consular space near the United Nations, among other wrongdoing.
He pleaded not guilty, and has insisted there was no “quid pro quo” with the Trump administration to drop the charges.
Trump denied being involved in the DOJ’s memo, but said he knew “better than anybody” how legal cases can be weaponized.
“I know nothing about the individual case. I know that they didn’t feel it was much of a case,” he told reporters at the White House when asked about Adams Friday.
The case is now in the hands of Judge Dale Ho, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, who will decide on whether to sign off on the unprecedented ask.
Ho, who previously worked for the ACLU and NAACP fighting for racial and voter justice, repeatedly shot down Adams’ defense motions, including his bid to toss the bribery charge and demand to hold a hearing to probe the feds’ alleged leaking of grand jury information.
District judges are allowed to reject the government’s bid to dismiss cases in rare circumstances when courts find that doing so would be “clearly contrary to the public interest,” according to a legal decision cited in Sassoon’s letter.
Former SDNY federal judge Shira Scheindlin told The Post that Ho could let a third-party “intervene” and oppose the motion, but that it’s “unlikely” that that would happen.
“Most judges would feel they have to grant the motion if the motion is made by the United States because the case is brought in the United States — that’s the caption: United States of America versus Eric Adams,” Scheindlin said.
“If prosecutors themselves moved to dismiss the case and here, you know, it’s without prejudice, which means it could be brought again at a later time, I don’t believe the judge would resist that,” she added. “After all, it is up to the executive branch to prosecute cases.”
— Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer