Judge Dale E. Ho, who is overseeing the foundering corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, is facing a storm of demands that he look deeply into the federal government’s reasons for seeking to drop the prosecution.
On Monday night, three former U.S. attorneys from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut filed a brief asking the judge to conduct an extensive inquiry into whether the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Adams case was in the public interest or merely a pretext for securing the mayor’s cooperation with the administration’s anti-immigration policies.
Earlier Monday, Common Cause, the good-government advocacy group, filed a letter with the judge asking that he deny the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the Adams case, which the group called part of a “corrupt quid pro quo bargain.” The organization also asked the judge to consider appointing an independent special prosecutor to continue the case in court.
And the New York City Bar Association, which has more than 20,000 lawyers as members, said Monday that the order by a top Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, to Danielle R. Sassoon, who was the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to dismiss the case “cuts to the heart of the rule of law.” The organization called for a “searching inquiry” into facts of what happened.
The legal and political crisis encompasses both New York’s City Hall and the U.S. Department of Justice, calling into question Mr. Adams’s future as well as the independence and probity of federal prosecutions.
Mr. Adams was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He pleaded not guilty and was scheduled for trial in April. But last week, Mr. Bove caused a cascade of resignations — including Ms. Sassoon’s — as prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington refused to comply with his order. On Friday, Mr. Bove himself signed a formal request that Judge Ho will now consider.
The law gives judges scant ability to refuse a prosecutor’s request to drop criminal charges. But Mr. Adams’s case may be an exception.
The former U.S. attorneys in their brief listed more than a dozen questions they said needed to be answered before Judge Ho could decide whether to approve the department’s request to dismiss the case “without prejudice.” With that outcome, the Trump administration could reinstate the charges.
“What is at stake here is far more than an internal prosecutorial dispute about an individual case,” the former U.S. attorneys wrote. “The public furor that has arisen during the past week raises concerns about respect for the rule of law and the division of power between the executive and judicial branches of government in our nation.”
The former top prosecutors who filed the brief were John S. Martin Jr., who served in the Southern District of New York; Robert J. Cleary, who served in New Jersey; and Deirdre M. Daly, who served in Connecticut.
The filing was made by lawyers with the pro bono firm Free and Fair Litigation Group who asked Judge Ho to accept the submission as a “friend of the court” brief. In it, they argue in support of his authority to conduct a factual inquiry into the Justice Department’s actions.
One of the lawyers who filed the brief, Mark Pomerantz, a former chief of the Southern District’s criminal division, said the brief was unusual in arguing that the judge should deny the government’s dismissal request because the parties to the case — the Justice Department and Mayor Adams — were in agreement that the prosecution should end.
“We would like to represent a point of view that none of the parties have an interest in presenting to the court,” Mr. Pomerantz said.
The New York Bar statement said Mr. Bove’s request that would allow the Trump administration to reinstate the charges against Mr. Adams was “expressly political.”
“The policy choices of the government of New York City cannot be dependent on or appear to be dependent on the decision of the Justice Department to prosecute or withhold prosecution of corruption charges against the mayor,” the statement said.
The former interim U.S. attorney, Ms. Sassoon, characterized Mr. Bove’s order to seek an end to the prosecution as a quid pro quo — a dropping of charges in exchange for the mayor’s support in Mr. Trump’s political goal of mass deportations.
“I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” Ms. Sassoon wrote in a letter to the United States attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Ms. Sassoon said in the letter that prosecutors had been prepared to bring an additional charge that would accuse the mayor of destroying evidence and instructing others to do the same.
A lawyer for Mr. Adams, Alex Spiro, called that a false claim. He said that if prosecutors had proof that the mayor destroyed evidence, “they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do.”
Ms. Sassoon resigned rather than obey, and at least six other prosecutors in New York and Washington did the same.
Mr. Bove, whose order specified that his decision to dismiss the case had nothing do with its legal strengths, finally signed the motion himself, along with two other Washington prosecutors, Edward Sullivan and Antoinette T. Bacon.
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