When the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors on Monday to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, he hoped that it would save his political career and allow him to better focus on governing the nation’s largest city.
Instead, the mayor is in even more peril, his political future is still in question and New Yorkers’ trust in him is precipitously waning.
In just the last 48 hours, the top Democrat in the House, nearly every major member of the city’s elected leadership, civic leaders, pastors and even staunch mayoral allies have credibly argued that he let President Trump gain effective sway over the most important City Hall in America.
Calls for his resignation have escalated. Pressure is mounting on Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove the mayor.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, citing Mr. Trump’s “leverage over Adams,” said that if the mayor “won’t resign, he must be removed.” Representative Nydia Velázquez said Mr. Adams must step down because the city could not be “led by someone under Trump’s thumb and willing to sell out New Yorkers.”
The calls also came from Democrats at the State Capitol, including Ms. Hochul’s lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, and the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Michael Gianaris, and from the mayor’s challengers in the June primary election.
The saga over Mr. Adams’s criminal case has also set off a crisis within the Justice Department, where the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and several top officials in the department’s public integrity unit in Washington resigned on Thursday rather than obey an order from the acting deputy attorney general to drop the case against the mayor.
In her resignation letter, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, accused Mr. Adams’s lawyers of negotiating for a dismissal in exchange for the mayor’s help with President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The mayor’s lawyers, she wrote, “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.”
The mayor’s open courtship of Mr. Trump, and his monthslong refusal to criticize him, have raised doubts over Mr. Adams’s ability to run the city independently. Many New Yorkers are worried about the president’s threats of mass deportations and funding cuts to key programs.
At the same time, many New Yorkers are concerned about an influx of 200,000 migrants from the southern border, the strain on the city of caring for them and some high-profile violent incidents involving migrants. The issue helped Mr. Trump perform better in the city in November’s election than he had four years ago and could be a central concern in the mayoral election this year and in the governor’s race next year.
Still, the mayor has done little to assuage doubts that he is beholden to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Adams used an appearance with Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, on Fox News on Friday morning to underscore the city’s collaboration on immigration enforcement, saying he was not “standing in the way.”
Mr. Adams highlighted their new agreement to allow federal immigration authorities to return to the Rikers Island jail complex. Then Mr. Homan boasted that the mayor was under his influence and said that Ms. Hochul was an “embarrassment” and should resign herself.
Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn who is running for mayor, said that it was the mayor who was humiliating himself.
“I’d say we’ve become a national joke with how embarrassing this is, but unfortunately none of this is funny,” he said. “The greatest city in the world is being humiliated daily because Adams is compromised.”
Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who is running for mayor, urged Ms. Hochul to take action.
“So much of Trump’s agenda would hurt New Yorkers,” she said. “We won’t be safe until Gov. Hochul uses her power to remove Eric Adams from office. We like puppets on ‘Sesame Street,’ not City Hall.”
Ms. Hochul, who previously suggested that she would not oust Mr. Adams, mostly remained equivocal, though she did not rule out removing him.
“The allegations are extremely concerning and serious,” she said in an interview on MSNBC on Thursday night. “But I cannot, as the governor of this state, have a kneejerk, politically motivated reaction.”
The crowded field of mayoral candidates running against Mr. Adams has jumped on the mayor’s vulnerability and started to campaign more aggressively. They held a series of news conferences this week to criticize the mayor’s cooperation with the president and the Trump administration’s unilateral decision to seize $80 million in federal migrant funding from the city’s account.
Mr. Delgado’s call for Mr. Adams to resign puts him at odds with Ms. Hochul. He similarly called on President Biden not to run for re-election last year before Ms. Hochul was prepared to do so, and could be considering his own campaign for governor next year against her.
Mr. Delgado said in a statement on Friday that while Mr. Adams is innocent until proven guilty, “it is clear that he is compromised and no longer capable of making decisions in the best interests of New York City.”
For weeks, Mr. Adams had been currying favor with Mr. Trump, visiting him in Florida and attending his inauguration. The mayor hoped that having the charges dismissed could prevent an embarrassing trial in April — and the prospect of prison time — and he could return to focusing on running for re-election.
But even before the Justice Department’s actions, Mr. Adams’s popularity had plummeted in recent polls that placed him well behind the former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who is considering entering the mayor’s race.
Mr. Adams sought to blunt the criticism in a flurry of television and radio interviews on Thursday night, defending his cooperation with Mr. Homan and arguing that he was not under Mr. Trump’s thumb.
“Anyone who believes I’m on a short leash needs to go back and look at my history,” he said.
Yet even Democrats in New York who have been reluctant to criticize Mr. Adams after his indictment in September have publicly expressed concern about his leadership, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Mr. Jeffries raised his strongest doubts yet about Mr. Adams on Thursday, saying that some New Yorkers in his district in Brooklyn were “deeply alarmed” and that fears over the mayor being compromised were “legitimately held concerns.”
“It is the intention of the Trump administration to keep the current mayor on a short leash,” he said at a news conference.
Adrienne Adams, the City Council speaker who has warred with the mayor, said on Thursday that the Justice Department’s order was an “instrument of blackmail” intended to make Mr. Adams “an arm” of the Trump administration.
The mayor’s allies have been willing to confront him as well. When Mr. Adams said that a new charter revision commission could alter the city’s sanctuary laws, Richard Buery, the chair of the commission who was appointed by Mr. Adams, went public with his opposition. Mr. Buery said the city should “be doing everything in our power” to support the city’s 600,000 undocumented immigrants, many of whom pay taxes and follow the law.
Another member of the commission, Carl Weisbrod, agreed with Mr. Buery: “I did not join to make it easier to expel law-abiding residents from the city.”
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