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Eric Adams and his lawyers insist there was no deal. In no universe, they’ve said repeatedly, did the Justice Department agree to drop the bribery case against the Mayor of New York City in return for his cooperation on the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
But on Feb 3., in a letter that received little public scrutiny, two of Adams’ lawyers explicitly asked Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to make the mayor’s charges go away so he could help Donald Trump on immigration.
“As his trial grows near, it will be untenable for the Mayor to be the ever-present partner that DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] needs to make New York City as safe as possible,” Alex Spiro and Bill Burck wrote in a letter to Bove, memorializing their meeting of January 31 and advocating “strongly in favor of dismissal.”
A week later, Bove gave the lawyers exactly what they wanted — a request for dismissal — using their very same logic: that Adams had to “devote” himself to fighting “illegal immigration.” But Adams still isn’t able to be that omnipresent partner to the feds, and may never be.
The Trump administration’s top immigration enforcer treated Adams like a half-competent intern on national television, and told him he expected more compliance. Eight Justice Department officials quit over what they saw as a corrupt deal. The Department’s reputation for independence — for sometimes bucking the president’s priorities, for keeping politics largely out of prosecutions — has been kicked in the gut. And Adams still isn’t off the hook; the Deputy Attorney General made sure that charges against Adams can be brought up again after the November mayoral election. The judge in his case hasn’t yet agreed to actually dismiss the case, and has ordered Adams and his lawyers to be in court at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
For months, the mayor and his team did everything they could to reach this moment. Adams went down to Mar-a-Lago and to Donald Trump’s inauguration. The mayor met up with Trump at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, and told his staff not to criticize the new president in public. It was all so over-the-top, Trump and his team laughed at the “thirsty” mayor. Adams eventually got a deal from Trump, but it’s clear his strategy has backfired spectacularly.
“New Yorkers know exactly what this is. And I think a lot of people were willing to give the mayor grace until he bent the knee,” Crystal Hudson, a New York City Council Member from Adams’ home borough of Brooklyn tells me. “They’re willing to let him, you know, go to the boxing match, or MMA, or whatever it was. But once he went all in, people were like, ‘Oh, nah, nah. We’re not having it.’”
In their letter, Spiro and Burck made light of what they saw as a relatively thin case against their client. But they focused largely on the political and policy implications of a mayor facing five felony counts.
“We wanted to address questions you have raised with respect to the indictment’s impact on Mayor Adams’s ability to lead New York City, including by working with the federal government on important issues of immigration enforcement,” they wrote in the letter to Bove.
Adams wanted to be helpful to the Trump administration as it “seeks to aggressively enforce immigration laws and remove undocumented immigrants,” they continued. But “Mayor Adams’s political muscle is weakened by an indictment.”
“Leaders of various city agencies such as the NYPD,” the lawyers went on, “serve at the Mayor’s pleasure and are subject to removal by him. Yet, to the extent that city officials perceive the Mayor to be politically weakened, on the ropes, or not long for the office, he loses some ability to make sure officials and their agencies are complying.”
It’s worth noting that the NYPD is strictly prohibited from working with federal authorities on civil immigration matters. And if it was Adams’ political juice the attorneys were looking to refill, the exact opposite has happened.
The lawyers didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a separate letter to the judge in the case, Spiro and Burck are adamant that this is all above board. “We told the Department that ending the case would lift a legal and practical burden that impeded Mayor Adams in his official duties,” they write. “We never said or suggested to anyone that Mayor Adams would do X in exchange for Y.”
By announcing the deal on the same day they paused foreign bribery prosecutions, Trump Justice Department officials made it look like they were functionally decriminalizing corruption. By choosing to investigate the line prosecutors who led the case against Adams, those officials made it look like the case was practically a pretext for seizing control of the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York — its most autonomous office, the so-called “sovereign district.” By dismissing Adams’ case only temporarily, they made it seem like they were forcing the mayor into subservience.
The Rev. Al Sharpton — who has known Adams since the then-cop was the activist’s bodyguard — expressed his disgust with the arrangement. (“They’re talking to New Yorkers as if we have no sense of a game being played, when we have the ability to spot one before it even starts,” he said last week.) Sharpton was one of a number of local political leaders who met with New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday, as she considers removing the mayor from office.
Eric Adams, who once proclaimed himself the future of the Democratic Party, is on political life support. His administration, long teetering on a chaotic edge, has been pushed further into dysfunction with the resignations of the four deputy mayors who ran much of the city bureaucracy day-to-day. His bet to cozy up to Trump appears to have been a bust. The mayor’s joint TV appearance with Trump “border czar” and former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan only made matters worse. He warned Adams that he would be “up his butt” if he wasn’t sufficiently helpful to Homan’s deportation push.
“This is a time when the City of New York needs a guardian at the gate, right? And instead, what we have is a mayor who’s rolling out the red carpet and rose petals for the ICE cowboy,” says Justin Brannan, who represents Coney Island on the City Council and is running for city comptroller.
“The challenge with Trump’s whole chaos and cruelty theater is that people who aren’t even necessarily targeted are also scared to death,” he continues. ‘It has such a chilling effect on communities — even folks that are here legally … And that’s the whole point. So to have the Mayor of the City of New York doing anything but standing up against that is very depressing — and disqualifying.”
Some political observers ask what Adams was supposed to do instead. There was no way for him to govern, much less run for reelection, while facing his April trial. This is one of the arguments the mayor’s lawyers used in their letter to Bove. “Conservatively, Mayor Adams will be spending 75 percent of his waking hours preparing for or on trial,” they wrote. At least this way, the argument goes, he stays out of jail.
But those same lawyers echoed sentiments common throughout the New York legal community that the case against him was riddled with “legal and factual weaknesses.” (Although the acting Southern District chief did say she was preparing a superseding indictment that included an obstruction of justice charge.) Still, there’s a chance Adams could’ve beaten the rap — or successfully cast himself as the victim of a justice system out of control — and endeared himself to just enough New Yorkers to win reelection. Donald Trump was indicted over and over again on felony charges, and it only drove his poll numbers up.
Adams has brought down crime as promised, and helped the city rebound from Covid. There’s a record to run on, if an uneven one. Even now, there are still Adams supporters, like A.T. Mitchell-Mann, who Adams named in 2022 as the co-chair of his gun violence prevention task force. “He is unfairly being targeted. And I don’t like the fact that he’s undergoing so much of this consistent scrutiny,” he tells me. “Like, you can’t win to save his life.”
Adams himself has been one step ahead of investigators for years. In 2010, as chairman of the state Senate’s wagering committee, he “demanded” a particular gambling company get a license to operate a slot parlor in Queens. He celebrated with company executives when they won the bid — and then he gave less-than-candid testimony when asked about the deal, according to a state inspector general report. In 2014, the city’s Department of Investigation found his One Brooklyn Fund nonprofit, meant to help local residents, failed to comply with local conflict-of-interest rules. From 2015 to 2019, real estate developers and lobbyists looking for favors from Adams contributed hundreds of thousands to the fund.
By 2021, his many trips to Turkey and China and his questionable fundraising tactics were known. “You’ve been investigated for corruption everywhere you’ve gone,” mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said to Adams at one debate. Years later, the trips to — and donations from — Turkey would form the basis of the bribery and corruption case against him.
Instead, Adams’ lawyers chose another path, one that has backfired in the worst possible way for him. And the craziest part is, they saw it all coming. “As Mayor Adams continues to help with DHS’ ramping enforcement operations, the risk that his political opponents — and in particular, the City Council — will try to remove him from power will only increase,” they wrote to Bove. “Governor Hochul also could conclude that, at a certain point, the Mayor can no longer devote the attention that his position requires and accordingly take steps to remove him.”
A little more than two weeks later, she was very publicly contemplating doing exactly that.
