A trove of documents from Mayor Eric Adams’ now-defunct criminal case released late Friday reveals extraordinary steps the mayor and his aides took to keep their communications secret — prompting the FBI to seek approval to unlock his many electronic devices by pressing the mayor’s fingers to devices or holding his head in front of them if needed to gain access.
In seeking warrants to search the devices of the mayor and his aides, the FBI told judges they needed to gain immediate access to the phones and other electronics upon seizure to prevent data from being deleted remotely.
Manhattan Federal Judge Dale Ho ordered federal prosecutors to release the search warrants at the request of The New York Times in the aftermath of the extraordinary dismissal of Adams’ corruption charges last month at the behest of the Trump administration.
The FBI’s filings, detailing evidence of suspected campaign finance fraud by Adams, campaign fundraisers and other associates, spell out step by step how prosecutors and investigators proceeded in a probe initiated by the Manhattan U.S. attorney in August 2021 — before Adams had won the election.
The search warrants targeted Adams and key players involved in Adams’ alleged scheme to solicit and accept illegal straw donations during his quest to obtain millions of dollars in public matching funds, including from foreign nationals with ties to the Turkish government.
The agents note that Adams used at least seven cell phones during the course of the investigation and, along with his aides, often employed the encrypted Signal app that can be set to automatically delete messages.
Those phones included one Adams obtained from the NYPD after the feds took four of his devices near Washington Square Park in a search of his vehicle in November 2023 — a device investigators learned about after they seized the phone of former NYPD commissioner Edward Caban last year and found Eric Adams in his contacts.
Adams continued to use Signal even after the FBI seized some — but not all — of his phones in November 2023, as he fundraised for his current reelection campaign. In a May 2024 Signal chat, the mayor exchanged messages with an individual identified as Businessman #4 whom, prosecutors say, had helped facilitate a straw donor scheme for the mayor’s campaign in 2020.
Adams messaged the businessman, identifiable through campaign finance and other records as Tolib Mansurov, asking him to provide twenty $250 donations from separate individuals to the campaign. “You have always been my strongest person,” he wrote.
The FBI noted that an Adams aide who had allegedly orchestrated the initial 2020 straw donor scheme with Mansurov referred to Adams’ ask as a request for $5,000, indicating to investigators that this was a solicitation of straw donations. The aide, Mohamed Bahi, has agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal charges but has yet to do so.
The new documents also describe an alleged conversation on Nov. 2, 2023, the day the FBI and DOI raided the homes of several Adams associates, including Adams campaign fundraiser Brianna Suggs.
The documents reveal that as the raid unfolded at her Brooklyn home, Suggs reached out to an unidentified assistant to Adams who told the FBI that Suggs said she needed to speak with Adams to tell Adams to delete his texts from “something government,” a description that is not made clear.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s campaign, Todd Shapiro, defended the mayor’s conduct.
“Today’s unsealing of documents affirms what we have long known — Mayor Adams did nothing wrong. These documents also show that federal authorities made false, reckless accusations with absolutely no evidence in a relentless, shameless assault on the mayor,” said Shapiro.
“The truth is now well-known: the mayor is innocent of any wrongdoing, and a handful of campaign volunteers attempted to take advantage of his trust.”
Where’s the Phone?
The search warrants also suggest a string of deceptions from Adams about the whereabouts of his devices.
During the September announcement of the indictment, prosecutors revealed that Adams had claimed when he was initially approached by agents seeking all his devices in the Village after an event, he admitted he had another “personal phone” that he promised to turn over the next day.
The records unsealed Friday, however, assert that GPS tracking data led investigators to conclude he actually had the phone in his possession at the time the FBI took his devices.
Contradicting Adams’ claims to investigators that he had left his personal phone at City Hall — unable to unlock it after changing the password — then brought it to his attorney at Gracie Mansion later that evening, the feds later learned through cellphone location data that Adams’ personal cell had been moved from City Hall on the evening of Nov. 6 roughly an hour before the Washington Square Park event, and had travelled northbound to about 29th St and 6th Ave. when it was turned off, turned to airplane mode, or its battery died.
“Location information for the Adams Personal Cellphone is inconsistent with the representations Adams made,” the court documents say.
When Adams finally turned that phone over to law enforcement, he claimed he had changed the password but couldn’t remember the configuration. Since then, the FBI has struggled in vain to gain access to it — asserting that communications with others indicate that this was the phone he used in most of his interactions about soliciting the contributions prosecutors alleged were illegal.
The FBI was so hard-pressed to locate Adams’ devices that in mid-September 2024, shortly before his indictment, it obtained a warrant to use a cell-site simulator, also known as a Stingray, in his vicinity to locate his devices.
Marathon Finish
The evidence described in the unsealed records would have played a central role in the trial that was cancelled after the Trump administration walked away from the case.
Because Ho was forced to dismiss the case, the public never got to see the basis for charges prosecutors defended as strong and Adams’ lawyers called weak.
The new documents reveal evidence prosecutors presented to judges last year to obtain approval for the search warrants leading up to Adams’ Sept. 26, 2024, indictment. That includes requests to gain access to cell phones and laptops for text messages between Adams and mayoral and campaign aides communicating about the mayor’s travel perks and his campaign’s fundraising.
They were also used to obtain internal records of the Adams’ 2021 and 2025 campaigns to corroborate discussions about fundraising that, at times, included the mayor — including messages exchanged with fundraisers already prosecuted in straw donor schemes.
In addition to exchanges between Adams and Bahi, the warrant applications include 2019 and 2020 messages about matching-funds-eligible donations sent between Adams and Dwayne Montgomery, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Federal investigators also sought to seize five cell phones at a Fort Lee, N.J., apartment they said was frequented by Adams, and described as that of his partner, Tracey Collins.
Investigators alleged Collins — a longtime Department of Education employee, most recently the senior advisor to the deputy chancellor — sought to help get the Turkish Consul General’s son into a select public middle school, M.S. 255 Salk School of Science in Manhattan.
According to text messages shared in March of 2023, Collins, whose name is redacted from the filings, agreed to contact the director of intergovernmental affairs for the DOE. A footnote in the documents later says DOE records don’t show the son enrolled at the Salk school.
The documents released Friday show the extraordinary steps law enforcement took to work around obstacles Adams and his aides had set up to avoid detection. The day they first confronted the mayor with a search warrant for his devices — Nov. 5, 2023 — happened to be the same day as the New York Marathon.
As one agent put it in seeking a judge’s approval to serve the warrant, investigators even considered confronting him at the marathon’s finish line.
Ultimately they demurred, approaching him instead the next day in the Village.
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