A hearing Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan will determine whether the Justice Department will be allowed to drop the criminal charges pending against Mayor Eric Adams. The Justice Department request sent shock waves through the ranks of current and federal prosecutors.
Here are the people who may participate in the extraordinary proceeding.
Mayor Eric Adams
A former police captain who was elected to lead New York City in 2021, Mr. Adams was the city’s 110th mayor and the first in modern history to be indicted on criminal charges while in office.
Mr. Adams, who is charged with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, insists that he has not committed any crimes and has vowed to remain in office. He continues campaigning for a second term even as calls for his resignation mount and top officials flee his administration. He argues that he was targeted for prosecution because of his criticism of how the Biden administration handled the country’s immigration problems.
Dale E. Ho
Judge Ho was first nominated to the federal bench by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2021 and then, after failing to win Senate confirmation, renominated in January 2023. He was confirmed by the Senate six months later in a 50-to-49 vote that fell largely along party lines, with some Republicans criticizing statements he had made on social media.
Judge Ho spent about 10 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he most recently supervised the group’s voting rights litigation unit. He clerked in the Southern District of New York, where he now presides, and at the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. He also worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Emil Bove III
Mr. Bove, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, previously represented President Trump as a criminal defense lawyer. Before assuming his current role, he was a partner at Blanche Law, the firm run by Todd Blanche, another of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense lawyers and the president’s nominee to be deputy attorney general.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Bove, who grew up in New York’s Finger Lakes region, spent nine years as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. The office, which has been pursuing the case against Mr. Adams, saw several of its top prosecutors resign rather than carry out Mr. Bove’s order to dismiss the charges against the mayor.
Edward P. Sullivan
Mr. Sullivan, the first prosecutor to sign the dismissal request, has had a long career with the Justice Department. He gained some notoriety in 2011 as part of a team that was investigated for possible misconduct in the prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska.
Several of his colleagues were found to have engaged in improper behavior, but Mr. Sullivan, who was reassigned for a period of time after the Stevens case collapsed, was ultimately exonerated by the Office of Professional Responsibility. In the case involving Mr. Adams, Mr. Sullivan reasoned that he had less to lose by signing the dismissal request because his public reputation had already been tarnished by the Stevens matter.
Antoinette Bacon
Known as Toni, Ms. Bacon is a longtime federal corruption prosecutor who joined the Justice Department in Washington to potentially lead its criminal division. She was the second prosecutor to sign the dismissal request and was a former acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York.
One career highlight for Ms. Bacon, who grew up outside Cleveland, was the prosecution of a sweeping federal graft case in her own backyard, the so-called Cuyahoga County corruption case. The case, which led to an overhaul of the county government, involved a county commissioner, a county auditor, a Cleveland City Council member, two sitting judges, nine lawyers (five of them former prosecutors), two union leaders and two senior hospital executives.
Alex Spiro
Mr. Spiro is a partner in the New York office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a large corporate law firm where he is a leader of the investigations, government enforcement and white collar defense practice.
Mr. Spiro, who joined Mr. Adams’s defense team in September, has established himself as a go-to lawyer for high-profile clients, including Jay-Z, Alec Baldwin and, most recently, the billionaire Elon Musk, a close associate of Mr. Trump’s.
He also defended Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots player, in a case in which Mr. Hernandez was acquitted of shooting two people; and Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner who was charged with soliciting sex in Florida. The charges were dropped.
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