MAKING SENSE OF THE ERIC ADAMS FLAP. For a while last week, it looked like it might become a major scandal. It still could, but with a few days’ perspective, the Trump Justice Department‘s decision to drop the public corruption indictment against New York Mayor Eric Adams seems more mismanagement than wrongdoing.
On Sept. 26, 2024, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed the indictment of Adams on five counts of bribery and campaign finance offenses. The basic charge was that Adams did favors for the government of Turkey in return for campaign contributions, free or discounted airline tickets, free high-end hotel rooms, and fancy meals.
The big showpiece allegation against Adams was that in September 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to visit New York for a United Nations meeting. The Turks wanted their newly constructed consulate in Manhattan to be open and ready for the visit, but it had not yet passed fire inspection, so they went to Adams. This is from the indictment:
In September 2021, the Turkish Official told Adams, the defendant, that is was his turn to repay the Turkish Official, by pressuring the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building — a 36-story skyscraper — without a fire inspection, in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey’s president. At the time, the building would have failed an FDNY inspection. In exchange for free travel and other travel-related bribes in 2021 and 2022 arranged by the Turkish official, Adams did as instructed. Because of Adams’s pressure on the FDNY, the FDNY official responsible for the FDNY’s assessment of the skyscraper’s fire safety was told that he would lose his job if he failed to acquiesce, and, after Adams intervened, the skyscraper opened as requested by the Turkish Official.
Shortly after the indictment was released, some powerful New York Democrats began nudging Adams, a fellow Democrat, to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) all made statements suggesting they’d like to see Adams leave. Adams pledged to stay and pleaded not guilty. His trial was scheduled to begin on April 21, 2025, when Adams planned to be running for reelection.
The months before and after Adams’s September 2024 indictment were, of course, the months of the presidential campaign. Candidate Donald Trump sometimes criticized the Adams indictment during campaign speeches, saying it was politically motivated. Some saw Trump’s remarks as an effort to highlight Adams’s dissent from Biden administration policy on illegal immigration — Adams had been complaining loudly about the burdens imposed on New York City by the arrival of thousands of illegal border crossers. For his part, Adams began saying that the indictment was a politically motivated move in retaliation for his criticism of the Biden border disaster.
Fast forward to Feb. 10. Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, sent a letter to the prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Bove ordered them to dismiss the charges against Adams with the conditions that the charges could be brought again in the future and that the matter would be reviewed by the U.S. attorney “following the November 2025 mayoral election, based on consideration of all relevant factors.”
Bove stressed at the beginning that he made the decision “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Instead, the reasons Bove gave were that the original case was arguably politically motivated and that the prosecution “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration.” Bove was particularly concerned that the prosecution would affect Adams’s ability to support Trump’s efforts “to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.”
To say the New York prosecutors reacted negatively would be an understatement. What followed might be called the battle of the indignant letters. On Wednesday, the acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, wrote a long memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi refusing to follow Bove’s instruction. Sassoon said she could not go to court and argue either of Bove’s two reasons, that the original case was politically motivated or that the prosecution would interfere with the enforcement of Trump’s immigration policy, in good faith. “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,” Sassoon wrote. She said if the Justice Department did not change its position, “I am prepared to offer my resignation.”
Bove quickly responded Thursday with a long, indignant letter of his own. “First, your resignation is accepted,” he told Sassoon. “The decision is based on your choice to continue pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice by suggesting that you retain discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner inconsistent with the policies of a democratically elected president and a Senate-confirmed attorney general.”
Near the end of the letter, Bove told Sassoon she should have followed his directive based on the two reasons he gave but then added that beyond those two reasons, “I have many other concerns about this case.” The prosecution of Adams, Bove said, “turns on factual and legal theories that are, at best, extremely aggressive.” Bove said he was particularly concerned about the 2016 McDonnell v. United States case, in which federal prosecutors charged former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell with corruption, won a conviction, and then saw the verdict overturned by a 9-0 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case changed how prosecutors think about public corruption cases, essentially creating a higher standard for allegations of bribery involving public officials. If a quid pro quo is alleged, it has to be one in which the official performed an “official act” in return for money or some other reward. The court ruled that the definition of an “official act” does not include relatively casual activities such as “arranging a meeting … hosting an event, meeting with other officials, or speaking with interested parties … even if the event, meeting or speech is related to a pending question or matter.” Instead, the court continued, “Something more is required. … The public official must make a decision or take an action on that question or matter, or agree to do so.”
Given that, one can reasonably raise concerns about the Adams case. Indeed, some commentators raised such concerns when the case was originally filed. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Prosecutors Overreach in the Case Against Eric Adams,” lawyers James Burnham and Yaakov Roth, who represented McDonnell in the Supreme Court case, wrote that the Adams indictment “spends many paragraphs discussing benefits received — many of them travel and entertainment — but is light on official actions promised in return.” Specifically, in the case of the Turkish Consulate, the major crime was Adams “helping cut through red tape so [Turkey’s] official facility in New York City would be ready for a presidential visit.”
Also at the time, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote that “once beyond the details of the opulent rooms and flight upgrades, there may be less here than meets the eye in some of these charges.” And the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal pointed out that, in the post-McDonnell world, “to sustain a bribery charge against a politician, prosecutors must link specific gifts to ‘a formal exercise of government power’ — a daunting task. Consider the fact that multiple donors to former mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaigns went to prison for bribery, yet de Blasio himself avoided prosecution. It’s just not that easy to convict an elected official for taking bribes.”
It’s also worth pointing out that in September 2021, when the big crime allegedly occurred, Adams was not the mayor of New York. He was the Brooklyn borough president, a job with little power, and the Democratic candidate for mayor — he won election on Nov. 2, 2021, two months after his alleged actions regarding the consulate. Also, it should be noted that the New York City comptroller looked into the Turkish Consulate fire safety matter and concluded it was far from unique.
The comptroller’s report reads, “Despite rejecting a deficient fire protection plan, the New York City Fire Department allowed the Department of Buildings to issue a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO) for the building on September 17, 2021, just in time for the building’s ribbon-cutting on September 20, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in attendance. The building was subsequently granted an additional 12 TCOs, with extensions approximately every ninety days, until September 26, 2024, when the last one expired. Turkish House is currently operating without a TCO or final Certificate of Occupancy (CO).”
The report adds: “Additional review by the Comptroller’s Office identified 637 office buildings that are without valid TCOs or a final CO, for an average of three-and-a-half years. Of these buildings, which have thousands of unresolved Department of Buildings and Environmental Control Board violations, 88 buildings have violations characterized as ‘immediately hazardous.'” Put it all together, and maybe Adams’s alleged action, getting a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy for the Turkish Consulate at a time when 637 office buildings were allowed to open and operate without any valid certificate at all, was not really the stuff of a big federal indictment.
So there were problems with the Adams prosecution. Nevertheless, Sassoon, who had been in her temporary position for three weeks and is due to have a baby in March, resigned. And so did a number of other prosecutors in the Southern District of New York office. One of them, an assistant U.S. attorney named Hagan Scotten, wrote a resignation letter to Bove, which ended, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
Sassoon, Scotten, and the others received glowing coverage in the press. Then, when top Justice Department officials moved the case to the Public Integrity Section in Washington, several lawyers there resigned, too. ABC News’s Jonathan Karl said the resignations were “an exodus that has drawn comparisons to the darkest days of Watergate.”
That is where things stand now. The question is: Did this big brouhaha have to happen, or did it have to happen the way it did? The answer seems to be no. Go back to Bove’s original Feb. 10 letter. Instead of talking about political motivation, for which there is some not terribly overwhelming evidence, or about immigration enforcement, Bove could have said that given the McDonnell case, plus other public corruption cases the Justice Department has also lost 9-0 at the Supreme Court, the department simply did not feel it was prudent to go forward.
Why couldn’t Bove have based his case on that? The Washington Post’s Jason Willick, who called the bribery allegations against Adams “underwhelming,” put it this way: “If the new administration wanted the charges against Adams dismissed, it could have led with the argument that, in its judgment, the case just wasn’t strong enough. Instead, it highlighted political and policy priorities. That will hurt the legitimacy of law enforcement and turbocharge the unfolding political backlash against the Trump administration.”
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But the Justice Department did what it did. Were the new Trump officials perhaps too honest about their motives, saying plainly they wanted to drop the case because they needed Adams’s help in immigration enforcement in New York when they could have based their argument on post-McDonnell fears that the case would not stand up to judicial scrutiny, even though their real motive was winning Adams’s help in immigration enforcement in New York? If so, it was a bad idea.
Still, does what has happened really evoke the darkest days of Watergate? Or is it a case in which Justice Department officials, certainly Bove, and perhaps his bosses, made a mess of a reasonably defensible move? Given the sheer volume and intensity of what is going on in the early days of the Trump administration, it’s not clear whether the Adams affair will grow bigger than it is now. But at the very least, it should be a lesson for the Justice Department in how to handle a politically sensitive matter.