The Justice Department on Wednesday offered a striking and contradictory new explanation for why it is seeking to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, with a top official arguing that the charges against the mayor are not well supported in law.
In a thread on X, Chad Mizelle, chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, criticized the basis of the charges against Adams and suggested that the case might not be winnable.
His comments — made shortly before acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove appeared before a federal judge to justify dropping the case — are at odds with what Bove has said previously, that the decision to drop the charges was not based on the evidence or the legal theories in the case.
“In the Adams case, SDNY was rolling the dice,” Mizelle wrote, referring to the Southern District of New York, the U.S. attorney’s office that brought the charges. “And given the DOJ’s abysmal history of losing at the Supreme Court, the odds were against the DOJ.”
Mizelle pointed out that the Supreme Court has in recent years issued a series of rulings in public corruption cases that have made it more difficult for prosecutors to prove bribery and related crimes against public officials. He argued that the Adams indictment didn’t meet the new threshold in part because the main “official act” prosecutors alleged he carried out in exchange for favors from the Turkish government happened before he took office as mayor.
The prosecutors who brought the case and other legal experts disagree. But what was most remarkable about his explanation is that it contradicted the one Bove had offered in his letter to New York prosecutors ordering them to dismiss the case.
In that letter, Bove said the DOJ reached its decision “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office at this time.”
Asked about that apparent contradiction, a Justice Department official said, “There can be multiple explanations for why this case should be dropped. They are not mutually exclusive.”
The Mizelle thread marked the third attempt by Justice Department officials to justify their decision to drop the corruption case against Adams, an act that has prompted at least seven DOJ prosecutors to resign in protest and sparked outrage across the political spectrum.
On Tuesday, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who once advised President Donald Trump, lambasted the decision as an example of “weaponization” of the legal system and called the episode “an embarrassing episode for the Department of Justice [that] further undercuts the public confidence in our system of justice.”
Bove, who laid out a series of reasons for dropping the charges in an initial letter to New York prosecutors, went much further in response to a letter objecting to the decision that then-acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi. In that second letter, he alleged without evidence that the prosecution was “inappropriately politicized and tainted… potentially permanently.”
Bove alleged that the U.S. attorney who oversaw the indictment, Biden appointee Damien Williams, launched a personal website after leaving office in December touting, among other things, the Adams prosecution. Bove did not explain how Williams’ actions violated any DOJ rule or legal ethical principle.
In her letter to Bondi, Sassoon said she is confident Adams is guilty of the charges, and that in fact her office was preparing additional criminal charges. She also pointed out that the investigation began before Williams became U.S. attorney and was overseen by nonpartisan career prosecutors.
Mizelle, in contrast to Bove, attacked the case itself. He began his series of posts by writing, “The case against Mayor Adams was just one in a long history of past DOJ actions that represent grave errors of judgment.”
He said he wanted to focus on “the legal theories underpinning SDNY’s case and the particularly expansive reading of public corruption law adopted by the prosecutors in this action.”
Mizelle noted that “to win a bribery conviction against a public official, DOJ must show some official act in exchange for benefits — a quid pro quo.”
He said the main official act alleged in the indictment took place before Adams was sworn in as mayor, in September 2021, when “a person associated with the Turkish government allegedly asked Adams to help ensure the swift opening of a new Turkish consulate in NY in advance of a visit from Turkey’s leader.”
Mizelle failed to mention that Adams had won the Democratic primary and therefore was assured to be elected mayor by then. He also did not note that Adams was at the time the Brooklyn borough president, and therefore a public official.
Mizelle went on to detail a series of setbacks suffered by the DOJ over the years in public corruption cases.
“Every time the DOJ has pursued expansive theories of public corruption, the Department has been rebuked by the Supreme Court,” he wrote. “Put simply, DOJ’s track record of public corruption cases at the Supreme Court is abysmal.”
For example, he said, last year the high court overturned the conviction of an Indiana mayor who was convicted of federal bribery in connection with illegal gratuities. “The Court rejected DOJ’s theory that accepting gratuities constituted quid pro quo bribery.”
“The year before, in 2023, DOJ unanimously lost two (public corruption) cases in the Supreme Court—both brought by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,” Mizelle wrote.
He concluded: “Given the history, DOJ had to decide—among other issues—whether to keep going down a road that the Supreme Court has viewed with skepticism on numerous occasions. Dismissing the prosecution was absolutely the right call.”
The case will not be dismissed, however, until the judge grants the prosecution’s request to do so.
Daniel Richman, a former SDNY prosecutor and law professor at Columbia University, told NBC News it appears DOJ officials are flailing in an attempt to justify a questionable decision.
“Changing the whole basis for their effort to dismiss the case only highlights the tissue-thin basis offered up front,” he said. “The government theory not only has substantial grounding in the law, but very good chances” on appeal.
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