Photo: Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty Images
Eric Adams is more than happy to be the Justice Department’s yo-yo. Keep me on a string, bounce me back and forth, do what you will, the mayor’s legal position goes, just so long as you dismiss my indictment and don’t bring it back.
This remains the key point of contention as we play out the endgame of the Adams legal saga. It’s now all but certain the Adams indictment will be dismissed, as both he and the new Justice Department leadership have requested. The only remaining question is whether the Trump administration can keep Adams dangling as its well-placed institutional plaything.
Quick recap: The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in September 2024 indicted Adams for bribery, conspiracy, and federal election crimes primarily related to his acceptance of financial benefits from Turkish nationals in return for official favors. The case seemed sound, if not quite overwhelming; a trial jury could have come out either way.
But when the Trump administration took over in early 2025, acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove — former SDNY prosecutor and, more recently, Trump’s criminal defense lawyer — ordered the SDNY to dismiss the indictment. Bove acknowledged that he had reached his conclusion “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Rather, the new DOJ honcho explained, the prosecution “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime” in New York City, in furtherance of the president’s policy priorities.
There’s the crux of the problem: For the first time in modern history — perhaps ever — federal prosecutors explicitly gave a criminal defendant a free pass because he promised to support the president’s political agenda. The SDNY’s conservative, Trump-administration-appointed acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, sharply rejected Bove’s crooked order and resigned instead. “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” she wrote. At least a half-dozen other experienced prosecutors at the SDNY and Justice Department headquarters followed Sassoon out the door in protest.
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Last month, Judge Dale Ho called the parties into court to discuss the DOJ’s unusual request; the federal rules of criminal procedure provide that a prosecutor must obtain “leave of court” — the judge’s permission — to dismiss an indictment. The judge asked probing questions of Bove, who confirmed that the DOJ’s decision was predicated on Adams’s support for Trump’s policy agenda — yet denied that there had been any quid pro quo between the parties. We are indeed rewarding Adams because of his political support and assistance, Bove explained, but not in (explicit) exchange for it. It’s a mighty-thin tightrope.
At one ominous moment, Judge Ho asked whether a similar prosecution-for-politics calculation would apply to other cases involving public officials. “Yes, absolutely,” Bove confirmed. Apparently, this prosecution-for-politics approach will serve as a prototype for the new Trump DOJ. Wonderful news for all public officials: If you get indicted, you can always wriggle out of it by endorsing some unrelated Trump policy initiative.
Recognizing that he had heard only from one side — Bove, Adams, and the defense team all heartily agreed on a dismissal, but Sassoon and other dissenters had no voice in the courtroom — Judge Ho took an unusual (but not unprecedented or unwarranted) step. He appointed Paul Clement, a respected conservative who served as U.S. solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration, to study and report back on the knotty legal questions around whether and under what circumstances a judge must accept a request by the DOJ to dismiss an indictment.
Clement has now filed his report, and it is entirely sensible and well-supported in the law and logic. He concludes that “neither the courts nor the citizenry can compel the executive to initiate a criminal prosecution,” and judges are “constitutionally powerless to compel the government to proceed” with a case that it wants to dismiss. Clement explains persuasively that, like it or not, it would violate core separation-of-powers principles for a judge to force prosecutors to carry on with a prosecution against the will of the executive branch.
But, critically, Clement concludes that the law does allow a judge to determine whether the DOJ can dismiss a case without prejudice (meaning the case can be refiled in the future) or with prejudice (meaning the case is dead for all time).
That’s particularly important here, given that the DOJ insists that the Adams indictment be dismissed without prejudice. The Trump administration’s plain intent is to keep the New York City mayor in line on immigration (and perhaps other) issues with a built-in enforcement mechanism for if he strays. Witness the Fox News cringefest wherein Trump “border czar” Tom Homan crowed, “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sittin’ on the couch, I’ll be in his office, up his, up his butt, sayin’, ‘What the hell, where is the agreement we came to?’” Adams overlaughed nervously as Homan batted around his new plaything on national TV.
Clement called out the precise problem posed by the DOJ’s proposal to keep Adams dangling: “A dismissal without prejudice creates a palpable sense that the prosecution … could be renewed, a prospect that hangs like the proverbial Sword of Damocles over the accused.” Thus, Clement concluded, the Adams indictment should be dismissed with prejudice, ending the prosecution permanently and preventing the DOJ from resuscitating its case. Perversely (but probably correctly, legally), the law dictates that Adams must receive an even more valuable gift (dismissal with prejudice) than the one Bove initially meant to confer (dismissal without prejudice). It’s good to be the mayor.
We should hear from the judge any day now, and I expect him to follow Clement’s recommendation and dismiss the indictment with prejudice, effectively cutting the string that the DOJ would’ve used to bounce Adams back and forth. But the whole saga reveals something deeper and more disturbing.
Adams was willing to do absolutely anything necessary to escape the consequences of an indictment, including kissing up to the president, conforming the city’s policies to please him and then offering himself up to the administration as a willing and pliable political operative moving forward. And the Justice Department was not content merely to reward Adams for his sycophancy. Rather, the Trump administration insisted on keeping control of the mayor, even beyond the end of the criminal case, by dangling the threat of a new prosecution.
If Judge Ho follows Clement’s counsel and ends the case with prejudice, then at least the prospective political damage will be mitigated and Adams — and, by extension, the city he manages – won’t remain completely in hock to the Trump administration. In a saga that has torpedoed the integrity of both Adams and the Justice Department, it’s a small but vital consolation.
This article will also appear in the free CAFE Brief newsletter. You can find more analysis of law and politics from Elie Honig, Preet Bharara, Joyce Vance, and other CAFE contributors at cafe.com.
