The Justice Department on Saturday forcefully argued that an offer from India’s richest man, Gautam Adani, to invest billions of dollars in the United States played no role in the department’s decision to abandon criminal charges against him.
In a letter filed on Saturday, Trent McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general, defended the Justice Department’s decision after a federal judge demanded that the government explain its move. Mr. McCotter accused people within the department of leaking to media outlets about the case and acting “unethically.”
The New York Times reported in May that Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Adani, had met privately with Justice Department officials to argue why the case should be abandoned. He asserted that prosecutors lacked basic evidence, and said that Mr. Adani could invest $10 billion in the United States and create tens of thousands of jobs, if the charges were dropped.
Mr. McCotter appeared to acknowledge the existence of such an offer, but said that the decision to end the criminal case had been reached before the offer was made.
“Before that topic first arose, I had already firmly concluded I would seek dismissal of the securities charges no matter what,” Mr. McCotter wrote in a letter to Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York.
Mr. McCotter assailed Justice Department lawyers, current or former, whom he accused of leaking information in hopes of preventing a flawed case from being dismissed.
Mr. Giuffra declined to comment. The Justice Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Mr. Adani, an industrial titan in India and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was indicted along with seven co-defendants in November 2024, in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said that he had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to Indian officials to secure lucrative solar energy contracts for his company, Adani Green Energy.
Though the bribes took place in India, Mr. Adani and his co-conspirators were subject to American law because his company had sought investments from people in the United States, prosecutors said at the time.
Mr. Adani’s lawyers and Mr. McCotter have vigorously disputed that reasoning. On Saturday, Mr. McCotter wrote that no harm was done to U.S. investors and that the case was fundamentally about Indians bribing other Indians, which the Justice Department had no interest in litigating.
Mr. McCotter wrote that if someone searched for the word “India” in the indictment, it would appear more than 200 times.
Yet the trajectory of the case against Mr. Adani — particularly the investment proposal — has highlighted the highly transactional approach to justice during President Trump’s second term.
In May, days after federal prosecutors wrote that they had chosen “not to devote further resources” to the criminal case, multiple Justice Department lawyers withdrew from the case, signaling internal disagreement over the move.
The next month, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, both Democrats, wrote in a letter to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, that the department’s decision “gives the appearance that the D.O.J. is an equal partner in corrupt behavior.”
Federal prosecutors cannot unilaterally decide to end a case. Judge Garaufis, who will ultimately decide whether to drop charges, ordered prosecutors to provide a more detailed explanation for their decision.
Judges have little ability under federal law to stop the government from abandoning criminal cases. But experts say that increasingly, under Mr. Trump, judges have scrutinized the rationale behind such decisions.
After the Justice Department in 2025 moved to dismiss federal bribery charges against Eric Adams, then the mayor of New York City, the judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, called the government’s rationale — that the case was harming Mr. Adams’s ability to help with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown — “unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”
On Saturday, Mr. McCotter chided Judge Garaufis for what he called a “judicial inquisition.” Such queries, he argued, risked exposing “privileged internal debates” within the Justice Department.
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