Up until Feb. 10, Mayor Eric Adams was running for re-election while preparing for a federal corruption trial set to begin in April.
All that changed when Emil Bove, acting Deputy Attorney General in the Trump Justice Department, ordered Manhattan federal prosecutors to dismiss all the pending charges against Adams.
Since then seven Justice Department lawyers who refused to carry out Bove’s orders have quit, four top deputy mayors have stepped down — and a long list of elected officials, union heads and good government watchdogs have called on Adams to resign or be removed from office.
The heart of the uproar centers on the nature of Bove’s motion to dismiss. He admitted that it’s not based on the merits of the case and instead is designed to allow Adams to focus on assisting the Trump administration in its signature initiative of deporting undocumented individuals.
One of the prosecutors who stepped down called foul, alleging in a letter that there was a direct and unlawful quid pro quo — a favor for a favor — between the Justice Department and Adams.
That accusation triggered an eruption of outrage, with critics alleging the deal gave the Trump administration a nefarious leverage over the mayor because it called for withdrawing the charges “without prejudice,” meaning the Justice Department could reinstate the indictment at any time if Adams didn’t do as they wished.
Today that quid pro quo allegation is front and center as a Manhattan federal judge considers whether the agreement was made in good faith and in the best interests of the public.
It’s a complicated picture, a pivotal moment for the city’s leader and a crucial test of how the federal court system will react to an aggressive move by the Justice Department under Trump.
To keep it all straight, here’s your guide on what happened, why it matters and what happens next:
Memory refresh: What charges did Adams face before the Trump Justice Department stepped in?
In September, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office unsealed a federal indictment charging Adams with bribery and campaign finance fraud.
The allegations include that he accepted $120,000 in travel perks, such as airline upgrades and free hotel stays, and that he solicited and accepted illegal “straw donations” — including some from foreign sources — in a scheme to obtain $10 million in public matching funds for his 2021 mayoral campaign.
Prosecutors allege that Adams in return used his public position — first as Brooklyn borough president and then as mayor — to assist donors as they navigated city bureaucracy. That included individuals associated with the Turkish government who sought his intervention to expedite safety inspections for a development project in Manhattan.
Once he was mayor, Adams also allegedly helped an Uzbek contractor resolve a buildings department problem who funneled money to Adams through straw donors.
Adams pleaded not guilty. His attorney, Alex Spiro, mocked the indictment as the “airline upgrade case” and labeled the charges “extremely weak.”
How did the DOJ make those charges go away? Can they even do that?
They can’t without a judge’s permission. Four days after Bove ordered Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to dismiss the case — and Sassoon refused and resigned in protest — Bove filed a formal motion to dismiss with Manhattan Federal Judge Judge Dale Ho.
The motion called for all charges to be dismissed “without prejudice,” which is a key legal term meaning they could be reinstated at any time. That’s important to Adams, who could potentially be charged again with the same allegations in the future. (More on that below.)
Ho is now considering whether to approve the dismissal motion, and he’s since appointed Paul Clement, a well-regarded former U.S. Solicitor General under President George W. Bush, as an independent advisor to the court to help him understand what his options are. Clement is now examining what Ho can consider in deciding whether the motion is in the public’s interest.
What does the Trump administration get out of this, anyway?
We can’t know for sure, and likely books will be written speculating on an answer.
Here’s what we know from the paper trail:
While Sassoon labels this arrangement a quid pro quo, and Spiro denied it (more on that in the next section), Bove’s initial memo specifically stated that in deciding to seek dismissal of Adams’ case, the Justice Department was “particularly concerned about the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams’ ability to support critical ongoing federal efforts” to “protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.”
Bove also stated in his formal motion that continuing the criminal case “would interfere with the defendant’s ability to govern in New York City, which poses unacceptable threats to public safety, national security and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”
Outside of court, we have a particularly illuminating scene to help parse whether there is a direct connection between the give and the get.
Critics of Adams pointed to a Feb. 14 Fox & Friends TV appearance featuring the mayor and border czar and former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director Thomas Homan. That day, Adams announced he was reinstating a policy allowing ICE back into the jails on Rikers Island, a concession Homan called “huge.”
Then Homan warned Adams, who was sitting next to him, “if he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on a couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying ‘Where the hell is that agreement we came to?’”
A bunch of people resigned over this, right? What does that mean?
Seven career prosecutors refused to be part of Bove’s order and resigned, including Sassoon. And that has made the case much more notorious in a number of ways.
Most notably, Sassoon’s Feb. 12 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi alleges some serious violations.
In the letter, Sassoon described a Jan. 31 meeting she had with Bove and Adams’ lawyers in which, she alleged, the mayor’s attorneys “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.”
She called this a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’ opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” noting that in issuing his order, Bove admitted he hadn’t even assessed the merits of the case.
In response, four of the mayor’s deputy mayors’ turned in their resignations, leaving dozens of city agencies without leadership and City Hall in disarray. Adams’ lawyer, Spiro, denied Sassoon’s “quid pro quo” accusation, and in late February filed a motion to dismiss the case outright. Critically, he demanded it be dismissed “with prejudice.”
Hold on, “with prejudice,” “without prejudice” — I’m lost. What do those mean?
On Feb. 26, Adams’ lawyer for the first time demanded that the case be dismissed “with prejudice” due to what he labeled “prosecutorial misconduct.” That means it couldn’t be reopened in the future.
That’s a big shift from the “without prejudice” caveat of the Justice Department’s motion from Bove, and it appears to be a way of eliminating the “quid pro quo” allegation by nixing any leverage the Trump Justice Department could have over Adams.
In his filing, Spiro also went a step further in his attack on Sassoon, now labeling her “quid pro quo” assertion “defamatory.”
That could open up a whole other can of worms — maybe. In determining how to handle the dismissal, Judge Ho could decide to question witnesses under oath about that now-infamous Jan. 31 meeting. That would mean Sassoon, Bove and Adams’ lawyers.
During a recent hearing, Judge Ho seemed to focus on that when he questioned Spiro.
What happens once the judge decides whether to approve or reject the dismissal motion?
There are several options available to Judge Ho: he could approve the dismissal without prejudice as is, which would leave the possibility of a reactivated case hanging over Adams head as he runs for re-election this year.
He could grant Spiro’s motion to dismiss it “with prejudice,” which would preclude further federal prosecution of the charges specified in the September indictment.
He could also reject the dismissal motion and appoint a special counsel to continue the case, similar to the way a federal court did when the Trump Justice Department moved to withdraw the plea of former Trump aide Michael Flynn.
And there is another possibility: another prosecutor, such as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, could step in and re-litigate the case.
Bragg has already indicted two top Adams’ aides on corruption charges (both have pleaded not guilty), and the agency that worked with him on those cases, the city Department of Investigation, partnered with the FBI in the bribery and campaign finance fraud case brought by the Manhattan U.S. attorney. DOI would therefore have working knowledge of the evidence gathered by the feds that could speed up a potential prosecution by the DA.
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