At the center of the uproar surrounding the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss criminal charges against Mayor Eric Adams is a single Latin phrase: quid pro quo.
The expression — this for that, in English — means a favor, something granted in exchange for something in return. The judge presiding over Wednesday’s hearing may scrutinize whether there had been an improper exchange that undermined the integrity of the dismissal motion.
Last week, the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove III, asked federal prosecutors in Manhattan to request that the judge throw out the corruption case, saying it would hurt the mayor’s ability to assist the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.
Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned in response. In a letter to the attorney general, she said that at a meeting in Washington with Mr. Bove and prosecutors, Mr. Adams’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo.”
The mayor, his lawyers had said, would help the Trump administration with immigration enforcement if the case were dismissed, according to Ms. Sassoon.
“It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment,” Ms. Sassoon wrote.
There is irony in the accusation that Mr. Adams is accused of trading official action on immigration to evade an indictment that had also accused him of a corrupt quid pro quo.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had said that Mr. Adams accepted luxury travel in exchange for pressuring the New York Fire Department to approve the opening of a high-rise consulate building for the Turkish government despite safety concerns.
Mr. Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has denied that his client agreed to a deal with the administration.
In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, Mr. Spiro wrote: “There was no quid pro quo. Period.”
Some lawyers have suggested that if there were one, it might be prosecuted under federal bribery laws that forbid elected officials from taking official action in exchange for receiving “a thing of value,” which the dismissal of Mr. Adams’s case could be interpreted to be.
Hagan Scotten, a Manhattan prosecutor on the Adams case who quit last week, wrote in his resignation letter to the Department of Justice that “our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”
Regardless, experts said, no such case would be prosecuted by President Trump’s appointees at the Justice Department — since they are the same officials who are determined to drop the Adams case.
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