The federal judge weighing a Justice Department request to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York has been doing so against an extraordinary backdrop — a series of moves by the Trump administration that have shattered the norms of the American justice system.
Since the government filed its motion to dismiss the case in February, President Trump and his aides have deported accused gang members in defiance of a court order, sought to deport students who participated in campus protests, moved to punish disfavored law firms and urged the impeachment of judges with whom they have disagreed.
The motion to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams represented its own stark departure. When the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department ordered Manhattan prosecutors to drop the charges, the interim U.S. attorney resigned rather than do so. Then she essentially accused her superiors of striking a corrupt deal to seek the dismissal of the indictment in exchange for Mr. Adams’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration policy, an allegation the Justice Department has denied.
To aid him in making his decision, the judge sought an independent analysis from a prominent conservative lawyer, Paul D. Clement, who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court. Mr. Clement, in turn, advised the judge against any deeper inquiry into the suggestions of impropriety. He issued guidance saying that the judge had no choice but to grant the government’s request.
Even if he orders the dismissal, as seems likely, the judge, Dale E. Ho, could use the opportunity to call out the unusual circumstances under which the Trump administration sought to end the prosecution, largely based on politics rather than facts and the law.
But, in the eyes of some other legal experts, Mr. Clement’s analysis failed to grapple with the full weight of the moment and rendered advice that would strip away the judge’s ability to act as a check against a potentially corrupt legal deal.
“There’s profound reason to be concerned that the Justice Department will weaponize federal prosecution in previously unimagined ways to serve the political agenda of the Trump administration,” said Thomas Ward Frampton, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has closely studied the seldom-used federal rule giving judges oversight over dismissals. Mr. Clement’s “narrow reading” of the law, he added, “would deprive the judiciary of one very small tool that it already possesses to limit that danger.”
Mr. Clement did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the separation of powers laid out in the U.S. Constitution, charging decisions are left firmly in the hands of prosecutors. And while judges can check that power in limited circumstances, they cannot force prosecutors to try a case. Judges who have rejected motions to dismiss charges have almost always been reversed on appeal.
But after receiving Mr. Clement’s brief, Judge Ho announced he would consider legal opinions submitted by other parties. And the fact that about a month has passed since all the briefs were submitted suggests to observers that he is carefully weighing his options.
Parsing those options requires wading into uncertain legal terrain. According to the briefs submitted in court, they may range from appointing a special prosecutor — which many experts said was contrary to the law — to simply signing off on what the Justice Department has asked.
Mr. Clement, for his part, suggested to Judge Ho that he need not delve any deeper into the circumstances surrounding the motion to dismiss, saying that those events were part of “an intramural dispute” that the judge had no role in resolving.
The circumstances, however, were not garden-variety disputes among prosecutors and high-level officials.
Mr. Adams was charged with bribery and fraud in September, accused of accepting foreign travel and illegal campaign contributions in exchange for taking official action on behalf of the Turkish government. But a few weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Emil Bove III, a former defense lawyer for the president whom Mr. Trump appointed to a top Justice Department post, ordered that the charges be dropped.
As one of his justifications, Mr. Bove said continuing the case would hamper Mr. Adams from enforcing Mr. Trump’s immigration policy — although the mayor had repeatedly said that the charges were not interfering with his ability to do his job.
The interim U.S. attorney who resigned rather than obey Mr. Bove’s order, Danielle R. Sassoon, wrote in a Feb. 12 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi that the mayor’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” in a meeting she had with Mr. Bove, “indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.”
Mr. Bove also said he had not evaluated the evidence against Mr. Adams and asked Judge Ho to preserve the government’s right to refile the charges later — a request that critics said would give the Justice Department undue influence over the mayor. Mr. Clement seemed to agree, writing that it would put a “Sword of Damocles” over the mayor’s head and recommending that Judge Ho deviate from the Justice Department’s request by dismissing the charges permanently.
Mr. Clement, in advising Judge Ho not to dig into the circumstances surrounding the dismissal, said the judge could not act as a referee between prosecutors. On the one hand, Ms. Sassoon and other prosecutors who quit made allegations about the dismissal. On the other, Mr. Bove accused Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney, of bringing the case against Mr. Adams to advance his own political career.
Mr. Clement did not acknowledge a key difference between those two sets of complaints, however. Mr. Bove’s accusations against Mr. Williams were based not on concrete evidence, but on inferences from the former U.S. attorney’s actions after he left office last December. Mr. Williams wrote a column about corruption in New York and created a website that fueled speculation he planned to run for political office.
There was ample material, on the other hand, for Judge Ho to scrutinize in assessing the Justice Department’s motives for ending the case.
That included: letters that became public from Ms. Sassoon and the former lead prosecutor on the Adams case; the resignations of Ms. Sassoon and seven other Justice Department officials; an order by Mr. Bove to investigate some of the prosecutors who resigned; and contradictory statements by administration officials, including the attorney general, about whether the case against Mr. Adams was strong or weak.
After filing his brief, Mr. Clement was criticized in some quarters for offering advice that would most benefit Mr. Adams despite suggestions that dismissing the case might be improper.
Joe Patrice, a senior editor at the legal publication Above the Law who has written about the dismissal motion, said Mr. Clement’s analysis had glossed over the accusations involving the Justice Department.
“Basically a paragraph is all he spends on that,” Mr. Patrice said. “It’s very like, ‘Wow. A lot of people seem to think that this was a little crazy, but whatever.’ And just hand waves it away.”
Aside from Mr. Clement’s opinion, some of the legal briefs Judge Ho agreed to consider supported the Trump administration. One, submitted by a former Justice Department official from Mr. Trump’s first administration, said the judge had no constitutional power to inquire into the government’s motives and “should instead order immediate dismissal of the charges.”
Others, including one from the advocacy group Common Cause and a group of former federal judges from both parties, urged Judge Ho to do the opposite — to gather more information, and to deny the government’s motion or even possibly appoint a special prosecutor.
Underpinning Mr. Clement’s overall recommendation about Mr. Adams was his assertion that the only purpose of the legal requirement that judges approve dismissals is to protect defendants from prosecutorial harassment, such as dropping charges only to bring them back before a more favorable jury.
But judges in some cases and legal scholars have argued that the power to oversee dismissals was also intended to let judges identify corrupt reasons for dropping charges. More than one appeals court has said judges can indeed reject motions to dismiss cases that are made “in bad faith” and clearly against the public interest.
A prosecutor’s move to drop a case should be refused, James C. Hill, an appeals court judge in Louisiana, wrote in 1976, if it appears he “has accepted a bribe or because he desires to attend a social event instead of attend upon the court in the trial of the case or because he personally dislikes the victim of the crime.”
Mr. Frampton, the law professor, wrote in the Stanford Law Review Online that there is little dispute that the purpose of the rule giving judges oversight over dropping charges, established in the 1940s, was “to guard against dubious dismissals of criminal cases that would benefit powerful and well-connected defendants.”
Mr. Clement’s brief, he said in an interview, “sweeps that under the carpet.”
In a case Mr. Frampton studied that predated judges having oversight over dismissals, the 1920s embezzlement prosecution of a politically connected Montanan, Franklin H. Woody, prosecutors ultimately moved to drop the charges, saying the money had been repaid and a conviction would ruin Mr. Woody’s legal career.
The judge in the case had no discretion to deny the motion but wrote that it sent a message that “criminal law is for none but the poor, friendless, and uninfluential,” according to Mr. Frampton’s article, while the wealthy could break the law “with impunity.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about Michael Rothfeld
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York. More about William K. Rashbaum
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